SA internet crunch: Another month to go before cables are repaired

Repair work is under way on the damaged subsea cable infrastructure that caused widespread internet outages a month ago. It will still take a month to complete on current schedules.

Four fibre-optic subsea cables snapped at the same time off the Ivory Coast on 14 March, causing widespread internet outages in a host of countries on the west coast of the continent.

The Léon Thévenin cable repair ship was dispatched to the Ivory Coast on 19 March to repair the cables and arrived 10 days later. The first repairs started on the Sat-3 cable, which runs to South Africa, but has the smallest capacity of the broken cables.