South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Ivory Coast hit by major internet outages
Major internet disruption has been reported in various countries across Africa.
Outages have been reported in countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Ghana and Burkina Faso.
The cause of the cable failures is not immediately clear.
"There
seems to be a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, impacting from
the north to the south of Africa," said Cloudflare Radar, which provides
information on internet connections.
Internet
connectivity in the Ivory Coast was down to around just 4% on Thursday
morning, according to Netblocks, which tracks cybersecurity and internet
connectivity.
Liberia at one point dropped to 17% while Benin was at 14% and Ghana 25%, Netblocks said.
In
South Africa, Vodacom said that "customers are currently experiencing
intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable
failures".
A fault has also been reported on the MainOne cable system which serves Nigeria's commercial hub, Lagos.
The Liberian government said internet disruption had been reported from Thursday morning.
Citizens
are unable to access the basic internet as well as social media across
the vast majority of the country. International bank transfers are also
reported to be affected while there are limited international voice
calls.
"It seems like 50% of my life is gone today," Benjamin Garkpah told the BBC from the Liberian capital, Monrovia.
Fatumata Barry said her business had stalled because she can't receive payments through mobile money.
The
Liberia Telecommunications Authority said it was caused by an incident
involving the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine communications
cable in Ivory Coast.
In
Ghana, the National Communications Authority (NCA) reported that
multiple undersea cable disruptions were responsible for the outage.
Cloudflare
posted on social media that major internet disruptions were ongoing in
The Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Niger.
