Seacom said on Wednesday that the submarine cable system it operates along Africa’s east coast is experiencing a “service-affecting outage”.

The incident began at midnight South African time.

“Seacom is experiencing a service-affecting outage on its subsea cable system between Mombasa (in Kenya) and Zafarana (in Egypt),” it said in a series of tweets.

It did not say what caused the problem.

“Customers with IP or other managed services terminating between Dar es Salaam (in Tanzania) and South Africa will remain unaffected but could experience a slight increase in latency (network round-trip times) as traffic is routed over Seacom’s west coast transmission links.”“All linear transmission traffic on the Seacom subsea cable system on the east coast of Africa, to and from Europe, are affected,” Seacom said in another tweet.

Update: Seacom said on Wednesday afternoon that the cable system is once again up and running. “We are still investigating the cause of the outage and will provide necessary updates as we have more information.”

In years gone by, downtime on the Seacom cable had a severe impact on Internet users in South Africa, particularly residential users, with Internet service providers relying largely, or even entirely, on the Seacom system for international bandwidth.

However, with the construction of new systems on the west coast, including the West Africa Cable System (Wacs), the impact is no longer nearly as severe as it once was.

Source: NewsCentral Media