Subsea cable Attack: Firm restores service to some customers

MainOne, a Digital Infrastructure Service Provider  on Saturday said that it had restored service to some customers and was actively working on restoring all services through capacity acquired on available  cable systems.

The organisation made this known via a statement on its website in response to news reports that it would take two weeks to five weeks for it to restore internet services.

The statement said that the estimated repair time that it had earlier declared was for its submarine cable fault to be fixed.

“The repair time is to enable our services to become fully restored and  independently supply capacity to  customers.

“We have already restored services to some customers and are actively working on restoring services to others via capacity acquired on available cable systems,’’ the statement said.

Earlier, MainOne said that it recognised the impact of the outage and was working tirelessly to make available restoration of capacity for temporal relief where feasible.

‘’We are very optimistic that our cable will be repaired as planned and services fully restored so that we can continue to operate with continued integrity of the submarine cable,” it said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) had said that the internet disruptions being experienced by organisations, banks, individuals were as a result of damage affecting major undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire.

The NCC said that the damage was causing downtime across West and South African countries.

It said that the cuts occurred somewhere in Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, with an attendant disruption in Portugal.

It said that cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe – had experienced faults, while SAT3 and MainOne had downtime.

The regulatory body added that similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), were said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea.

This, it said, resulted in degradation of services across these routes.

Recall that in an earlier statement, MainOne had declared a force majeure on its contractual obligations while explaining steps to restore connectivity.

The force majeure is an unforeseeable circumstance that prevents someone from fulfilling a contract.

The unforeseen circumstances maybe natural disasters (fire, storms, floods), or governmental or societal actions (war, invasion, civil unrest, labour strikes), or infrastructure failures (transportation, energy).

MainOne, an Equinix company, is one of the leading data centre and connectivity solution provider with presence in Nigeria, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.