On Thursday 14th March 2024, West and Central Africa encountered a significant internet blackout, as stated by Netblocks, an internet monitoring organization. The outage, which affected multiple countries, was reportedly caused by failures in several subsea cables. However, the exact reasons behind these cable failures remain unclear.
Netblocks reported that Ivory Coast was particularly hard hit by the outage, while Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso also experienced notable disruptions. Cloudflare, a prominent internet company, verified the extent of the disruptions in Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Niger through its monitoring systems.
Cloudflare’s observations revealed a consistent timing pattern in the disruptions, spanning from northern to southern regions of Africa. Vodacom, a telecom operator in South Africa, linked connectivity issues in the country to the undersea cable failures affecting network providers.