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When submarine cables cut, who keeps running?

West African submarine cable cuts have caused multi-country outages with hours-to-days of impact. We use these incidents to pressure-test our customers' resilience designs, and most fail.

2 Feb 20264 min read

West Africa has seen multiple high-profile submarine cable incidents in recent years, events that knocked out international connectivity across Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, and beyond for hours and in some cases days. These events are not 'black swans'; they are foreseeable disruptions in a system with concentrated international capacity routes.

What we see when we do the post-incident audit

  • Customers nominally on 'redundant' international links discovering that both providers ride the same physical cable.
  • Failover paths that are theoretically present but never tested in production conditions.
  • Bandwidth-management policies that don't degrade gracefully, entire applications go down rather than throttling cleanly.
  • Voice and collaboration services routed in ways the customer didn't realise depended on international transit.

The real resilience checklist

  • Two independent international transit providers, on physically diverse cables.
  • A LEO satellite path (Starlink today, Kuiper soon) as a third, fully-independent leg.
  • Application-aware degradation policies, keep VoIP up even when the bulk-transfer queue gets shed.
  • Quarterly real failover tests, not paper exercises.
  • An incident-response runbook that names humans, not just tools.
What this means for you

If you can't say with confidence which physical cables your traffic rides today, you don't have a redundancy story, you have a redundancy diagram. We audit this for clients before we propose any rearchitecture.

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