Thirteen countries across Africa experienced Internet outages on Thursday due to damage to submarine fiber optic cables. Some countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, are still suffering from nationwide outages.
Multiple network providers reported Internet outages yesterday, and Cloudflare’s Radar tool, which monitors Internet usage patterns, detailed how the outage seemingly moved from the northern part of West Africa to South Africa. All 13 countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, The Gambia, and Togo) reportedly suffered nationwide outages, with most seeing multiple networks hit.
I wonder what happened. Well, I mean, these undersea cable breaks are nearly always caused by a ship’s captain with innovative ideas about anchor usage, but there’s a tiny chance it could be something nefarious too – although with no apparent motive, I’d assume it’s just run of the mill incompetence like usual
Yeah, IDK if it’s incompetence or sabotage, but Russia has been threatening to do it for awhile. They threaten a lot too, so who knows. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-medvedev-says-moscow-now-has-free-hand-destroy-enemies-undersea-2023-06-14/
Yeah, they were the initial main suspects in the undersea cable & LNG pipeline fuckery that happened in the Baltic late last year, but it turned out a Chinese ship is somehow tied to it which made the whole thing way more interesting since it seems the damage was deliberate (or the ship’s captain and crew were so fantastically incompetent they didn’t notice they were dragging anchor for over 100km, which doesn’t seem likely although not impossible either).
Personally I don’t think it’s likely that the Russians would have done this if it did turn out to be sabotage; they have a lot of allies of some degree or another in Africa and among those countries affected, so it doesn’t seem like they’d have a motive to do it – they would have screwed over friendly nations for absolutely no gain, and while they do shoot themselves in the foot all the time, cutting those cables seems like it would be an incredibly stupid footgun even for them. Although I’m reasonably clued in on this stuff I’m absolutely not some sort of geopolitics expert though, so just because I can’t see a motive or gain doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be any, but it does seem unlikely they’d be the culprit. If I had to bet on someone, it’d be a regional actor, but in classic European whitey fashion I’m shamefully underinformed on the goings-on in Africa so I don’t even know who to bet on.
But yeah, as I said, it’s probably just dumbfuckery as it is in 99.9% of the cases when cables break. It’s just fun to speculate.
