Tanzania’s US embassy was closed due to an internet outage

Due to an internet outage that affected several East African nations on Sunday, the US Embassy in Tanzania was shuttered for two days.

The embassy posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, saying, “The embassy will remain closed to the public due to degraded network service nationwide.”

Tuesday and Wednesday’s consular appointments were canceled and rescheduled for a later time. The embassy declared that it will continue to be available to handle emergency situations involving US nationals and to issue visas.

A cut in deep-sea fiber cables in Mtunzini, a small coastal town in South Africa, has resulted in poor internet connections for households and businesses in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and seven other countries.

The East Africa undersea System (Easy) and Seacom, two mostly privately owned undersea cables that serve East and Southern Africa, were impacted by the fault.

Tanzania and the French island of Mayotte were the hardest afflicted by the outage, according to internet monitoring company Netblocks.

The Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) stated that while the deep-sea cable recovery process was being handled, it was developing a backup plan to restore connectivity to the nation’s main telecom networks.