Kenya to continue experiencing slow internet speeds - Communications Authority

Kenyans will continue experiencing slow internet speeds in the coming days, the Communication Authority of Kenya (CAK) announced on Monday, citing the disruption of services in and around several East African nations.

Internet observatory Netblocks confirmed a disruption in East Africa on Sunday, saying the incident was linked to failures affecting the SEACOM and East African Submarine System (EASSy) subsea cable systems.

In a statement on Monday, CAK Director General and Chief Executive Officer David Mugonyi said they established that a deep-sea fibre cut had occurred on the Mtunzini teleport station, affecting several submarine cables serving Kenya, including SEACOM and EASSy's.

“Yesterday, the authority received reports on intermittent data outages and traffic jams on the submarine cable Internet traffic flow into the country. We wish to inform individual and corporate consumers that the recovery process has since commenced, but internet intermittency and slow speeds may remain in the coming few days before services are fully restored,” Mugonyi said.

Meanwhile, service providers were directed to take proactive steps to secure alternative routes for their traffic and to monitor the situation closely to ensure incoming and outbound internet connectivity is available.

Mugonyi noted that the East Africa Marine System (TEAMS) cable, which was affected by the cut, was being used for local traffic flow.

He added that redundancy on the South Africa route had been activated to minimise the impact.

Communication service provider Safaricom earlier announced that it was sourcing additional capacity from other undersea cable partners to cover the affected bandwidth while working with impacted service providers on a resolution.

Safaricom added that its services remained available, but that some customers would experience slow connectivity and speeds.

“We continue to monitor our network and service delivery to customers following the internet service degradation caused by multiple undersea cable cuts that deliver traffic in and out of Africa, affecting several countries,” the service provider said on Monday.

On Sunday, Ben Roberts, the group chief technology and innovation officer at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, said internet services across East Africa were severely impacted due to confirmed faults in submarine cables connecting the region to South Africa.

He noted that three crucial submarine cables in the Red Sea—SEACOM, EIG, and AAE1—suffered a cut, resulting in the utage.

In its announcement via X, Netblocks said Tanzania and the French island of Mayotte were experiencing a high impact on internet connectivity, while Mozambique and Malawi were seeing a medium impact.

Internet firm Cloudflare said on one of its X accounts that monitors trends that internet disruptions were ongoing in Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar as a result of faults reported on the EASSy and SEACOM cables.

Nape Nnauye, Tanzania's minister of information, communication and information technology, said in a statement on Sunday that the government had been informed by EASSy and SEACOM of disruption to the internet caused by a fault on the cables between Mozambique and South Africa.

"There are ongoing efforts to solve the problem," he said. "As they continue to solve the problem, we will have very low access to internet and international voice calls."

Additional reporting by Reuters