East Africa Experiences Internet Outages, Connectivity Issues after Sub-sea Cable Cut

Several countries in East Africa, including Kenya, are experiencing slow internet connections after at least one sub-sea cable serving the region was cut.

According to Bloomberg, Ben Roberts, chief technology and innovation officer at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, said: “The information we have has confirmed that one of the sub-sea cables appears to have been cut 45 kilometers north of Durban ... This is causing slow internet.”

Roberts said the East Africa region was affected because some of its large content providers are served by data centers in South Africa, the closest point to Kenya. He added that Internet traffic has been rerouted while engineers resolve the issue.

“Network data shows internet outages in and around several East African countries,” Internet analysis firm NetBlocks said in a post on X.

Damage to four undersea cables off the west coast of Africa disrupted internet services across the continent in March.

All West African cable systems were affected at the time, leading to service outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers, according to data from companies including NetBlocks, QNTech and Cloudflare.