First Under Sea Internet Cable Repair Ship Arrives at SAT-3 Site in West Africa

Orange Marine’s cable ship Léon Thévenin has reached the site of one of the major undersea cable breaks off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire.

On March 14th, widespread outages occurred along the West African coast due to damage sustained by multiple cables in a suspected undersea landslide. The affected cables include WACS, MainOne, SAT-3, and ACE.

According to reports from MyBroadband, Léon Thévenin, which set sail on March 19th, is currently focused on repairing the SAT-3 cable. It reached the fault area by the end of March.

Also Read: Major Internet Disruption Hits Several African Countries

While the Telekom-controlled SAT-3 cable offers less capacity compared to the other damaged cables, the arrival of C.S. Sovereign is anticipated by April 8th to address the MainOne, WACS, and ACE cables.

SAT-3, with 12 landing points spanning from Portugal to South Africa, is expected to be fully repaired by the second week of April.

Subsequently, the restoration timeline for the ACE and WACS cables is projected for April 17th and April 28th, respectively. The repair of the MainOne cable is slated to conclude by May 9th.

Notable customers impacted by the cable damage include Mweb, Openserve, Seacom, Telkom, Vodacom, Vumatel, and Vox.

The disruptions caused an estimated two-hour outage on Vodacom’s data network in South Africa. Moreover, Microsoft Azure services, including Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365, were affected due to the outage of locally hosted cloud services. However, service restoration was achieved after affected companies secured additional capacity on operational undersea cables, such as Google’s Equiano cable.