Undersea cable cut: MainOne restores service to customers

A digital infrastructure service provider, MainOne, says it has restored service to some customers and is actively working on restoring all services through capacity acquired on available cable systems.

MainOne made this known via a statement released on its website on Saturday, March 16, 2024, in response to news reports that it would take two weeks to five weeks for it to restore internet services.

The company noted that the estimated repair time that it had earlier declared was for its submarine cable fault to be fixed.

It said: “The repair time is to enable our services to become fully restored and independently supply capacity to customers.

“We have already restored services to some customers and are actively working on restoring services to others via capacity acquired on available cable systems.”

MainOne had earlier said it recognised the impact of the outage and was working to make available restoration of capacity for temporal relief where feasible.

Internet outage: Glo up as other providers suffer disruptions

“We are very optimistic that our cable will be repaired as planned and services fully restored so that we can continue to operate with continued integrity of the submarine cable,” it noted.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) had said the internet disruptions being experienced by organisations, banks, and individuals were a result of damage affecting major undersea cables near Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire.

The NCC said the damage was causing downtime across West and South African countries.

It stated that the cuts occurred in Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, with an attendant disruption in Portugal.

It said cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe – had experienced faults, while SAT3 and MainOne had downtime.

The regulatory body added that similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), and Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), were said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea.

This, it said, resulted in the degradation of services across these routes.

MainOne had, in an earlier statement, declared a force majeure on its contractual obligations while explaining steps to restore connectivity.

The force majeure is an unforeseeable circumstance that prevents someone from fulfilling a contract.

The unforeseen circumstances may be natural disasters (fire, storms, floods), governmental or societal actions (war, invasion, civil unrest, labour strikes), or infrastructure failures (transportation, energy).

MainOne, an Equinix company, is one of the leading data centre and connectivity solution providers with a presence in Nigeria, Ghana, and Cote d’Ivoire.

The Star