By Precious D. Freeman
Liberia had begun experiencing internet connectivity outage since midnight today and it is to enable ongoing repairs on a segment of the optical fiber cable between Dakar and Abidjan, which links Liberia to the outside world, officials say.
In a press statement issued by the Cable Consortium of Liberia, officials said the repair work on a segment of the cut optical fiber cable between Dakar and Abidjan, which is segment 2.1 of the ACE Submarine Cable Network and connects Liberia to the outside world had been impacted.
According to CCL, the scheduled repair work is expected to last for 10 hours, adding that during these repair hours, all internet traffic transiting ACE Segment 2.1, including traffic from Monrovia, Abidjan, Freetown, Conakry, and Banjul to Europe will be down.
It could be recalled that during the early weeks of this month, widespread outages were reported in countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso and the cause of the internet outages were due to multiple undersea cable disruptions.
Liberia experienced a major internet outage on Thursday, March 14, 2024, affecting multiple countries in West and Central Africa.
The outage was caused by damage to several undersea cables along the West African coastline, particularly the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine communications cable in Ivory Coast and the precise cause of the cable failures remains unclear, but it likely involved debris or earth slides that damaged the cables.
Internet connectivity in Liberia dropped to around 17% during the outage, leaving citizens unable to access basic internet services, social media, and international bank transfers and the outage had severe consequences for individuals and businesses that rely heavily on the internet.
The Liberian government acknowledged the disruption, and the Liberia Telecommunications Authority confirmed it was caused by the incident involving the ACE cable in Ivory Coast. Internet services were slowly being restored across the affected regions by March 15, 2024.
