Major internet outage experienced in West and Central Africa

Several telecom operators are experiencing multiple subsea cable failures, resulting in a major internet outage that affected countries in West and Central Africa on Thursday.

Internet observatory website Netblocks says "the incident affects networks supplying telecoms via subsea cables to multiple countries and operators."

The countries affected include Nigeria, Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, and Niger Republic, according to Internet firm Cloudflare in a post on the X.

Although details of the cause of the cable failures are sketchy, African subsea cable operator SEACOM confirmed to Reuters that services on its West African Cable System were down and that customers who relied on that cable were redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which SEACOM also uses.