The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has said that repair works are ongoing on the undersea cable cuts that resulted in equipment faults on the major undersea cables along the West African Coast on Thursday leading to internet service disruption.
We had reported that the internet outage on Thursday afternoon experienced across the West African countries including Nigeria was said to be a result of damage to at least three subsea cables in the region.
The West Africa Cable System, MainOne, and ACE sea cables — arteries for telecommunications data — were all affected on Thursday, triggering outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers in the region.
MainOne on Friday said that an “external incident” resulted in a cut to its cable system in the Atlantic Ocean, offshore Cote D’Ivoire along the coast of West Africa, ruling out human activity as a cause.
“Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable”, MainOne said, adding it would obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during the repair.
“Given the distance from land, and the cable depth of about 3 km (1.86 miles) at the point of fault, any kind of human activity – ship anchors, fishing, drilling, etc has been immediately ruled out,” Reuters quoted MainOne as saying.
