The West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables — arteries for telecommunications data — were all affected on Thursday.

This led to widespread internet service disruption across the countries.

MTN Nigeria in a statement said that the network outage was as a “result of damage to international undersea cables across East & West Africa.

“The repair process is ongoing to resolve the situation as soon as possible. Please look out for further updates,” the company said.

Microsoft also reported network latency issues in its South Africa North and South Africa West locations.

Microsoft said, “Starting at 10:30 UTC on 14 Mar 2024, customers using Azure Services in South Africa North and South Africa West may experience increased network latency or packet drops when accessing their resources.

“We have determined that multiple fibre cables on the West Coast of Africa — WACS, MainOne, SAT3, ACE — have been impacted which reduced total capacity supporting our regions in South Africa.

“In addition to these cable impacts, the on-going cable cuts in the Red Sea — EIG, Seacom, AAE-1 — are also impacting capacity on the East Coast of Africa. This combination of incidents has impacted all Africa capacity – including other Cloud providers and public Internet as well.”

In South Africa, Vodacom, a mobile operator, also reported “intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures.”

The case was the same in Namibia and Lesotho as internet service was disrupted.