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Retrospective · West Africa, March 2024 · published 21 October 2026

West Africa lost four undersea cables in one day

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On 14 March 2024, four of the undersea cables that carry West Africa's internet broke on the same day, off the coast of Côte d'Ivoire. From Nigeria to Ghana to Côte d'Ivoire, millions of people lost or slowed to a crawl, some for more than a week.

What happened

14 Mar 2024 The WACS, ACE, SAT-3 and MainOne cables failed. The Internet Society's report describes a suspected underwater rock slide off Côte d'Ivoire; MainOne said seismic activity on the seabed may have caused the cuts.
The same day Regulators in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire reported disruption. Ghana's regulator said the affected system had lost 90 to 100% of its capacity.
The following days Operators rerouted traffic over land to cables that were still working, and Google's Equiano cable saw its traffic multiply by four. Repair ships were sent out to fix the breaks one by one.

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Why it mattered

Many West African countries had thought they were safe with several cables. But the cables ran close together, along the same stretch of seabed, so one landslide could break several at once. It came only weeks after separate cable cuts in the Red Sea, and it made route diversity, not just the number of cables, the lesson of the year.

What Blackout Map shows

This one is in our archive too. The IODA data we imported shows Côte d'Ivoire falling to about 1% of normal on 14–15 March, a near-total blackout, Ghana in blackout from 14 to 20 March with reachability as low as 16%, and Nigeria with a shorter partial outage. See the histories of Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria. Today our cable data would also show which cables each country depends on.

Sources

Blackout Map is a live map of internet outages and shutdowns around the world. Open the map · Security watch · RSS · Follow us on X: @Blackoutmap_net

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