Ghana Lost the Internet for a Day. It Won't Be the Last Cable Cut.

On June 27, 2026, MTN Ghana sent its customers a terse notice: a subsea cable off the coast of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, had been damaged, and data services across the country would be degraded until it was repaired. It was not an isolated incident. Months earlier, a cable break roughly 45km north of Durban, South Africa, had already demonstrated how quickly the failure of a single undersea line can ripple across borders — Cloudflare Radar recorded Tanzanian internet traffic collapsing to about 30 percent of expected levels, with Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda all registering measurable disruption from a cut thousands of kilometres from their own coastlines. Two incidents, months apart, on opposite sides of the continent, both tracing back to the same underlying fact: most of Africa's connection to the rest of the internet still runs through a small number of glass fibres lying on the seabed, any one of which a ship's anchor or a shifting current can sever.

A single point of failure, again