Significant internet outage affects East African countries

Sunday saw internet connectivity issues in and around a number of East African countries, according to the internet observatory Netblocks. It further stated that the outage was caused by issues with the SEACOM and EASSy undersea cable systems.

According to Netblocks on social networking site X, internet connectivity was having a high impact on Tanzania and the French island of Mayotte, and a medium impact on Mozambique and Malawi.

Internet service provider Cloudflare claimed on one of its trend-tracking X accounts that internet outages were still occurring in Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar due to issues with the SEACOM and East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) cables.

In a statement released on Sunday, Tanzania’s Minister of Information, Communication, and Technology, Nape Nnauye, stated that the government had been notified by SEACOM and EASSy of an internet outage stemming from a problem with the cables connecting South Africa and Mozambique.

“Efforts to solve the problem are ongoing,” he stated. “We will have very limited access to international voice calls and the internet as they continue to solve the problem.”

The largest telecom provider in Kenya, Safaricom, also stated in a post on the X platform that it has “activated redundancy measures to minimise service interruption” following notification of an outage on one of the nation’s cables.