Nigeria’s internet traffic affected as MainOne cable suffers 14-day outage

MainOne, West African connectivity and data solutions company, says that it has experienced a fault on its submarine cable system.

According to a statement by the company, the fault, which is the first of its kind in seven years of its existence, caused disruptions in services to their international connectivity customers.

“Early in the morning of Sunday, June 18th, 2017, we experienced a fault on our submarine cable system, 3000KM offshore Portugal. The outage, the first of its kind in 7 years since our cable system came into operations, has caused disruptions in service to our international connectivity customers in West Africa.

“Supported by our cable maintenance arrangement with the Atlantic Cable Maintenance & Repair Agreement (ACMA), we immediately mobilized a repair vessel from France early Monday morning to pick up the necessary spares and personnel to recover the affected sections of the submarine cable in the Atlantic Ocean and effect repairs. The current estimated time for the repairs may be up to 14 days.

“Whilst this is an event of Force Majeure, being beyond our control in the ordinary and normal course of business, we have in the interim, made available existing restoration capacity and have secured additional capacity to offer temporary relief to our customers, where feasible.”

MainOne’s customers include internet service providers (ISPs), numerous networks and content providers.

Technology Times reports that the impact of the cable fault was most felt on Monday morning as affected service providers had to switch to alternative cables.

MainOne offers high capacity transmission to wholesales customers to power data services for internet access through regular online services as well as 3G and 4G networks.