MainOne, a prominent Digital Infrastructure Service Provider, announced on Saturday that it had begun restoring services to some customers and was actively working to fully restore all services. This update comes in response to earlier reports suggesting a lengthy restoration period ranging from two to five weeks.
The organisation clarified that the initially estimated repair time was specifically for fixing a fault in its submarine cable. They emphasized that efforts were underway to independently supply capacity to customers, with services already restored to some and ongoing efforts to restore others using available cable systems.
MainOne acknowledged the impact of the outage and expressed optimism about repairing the cable as planned to ensure full service restoration. The outage, which affected organisations, banks, and individuals, was attributed to damage to major undersea cables near Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, according to the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC).
The NCC stated that cuts in cables like the West African Cable System (WACS), African Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT3, and MainOne had caused downtime across West and South African countries. Similar disruptions were reported in undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, including Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), and Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1).
MainOne had earlier declared a force majeure due to the unforeseen circumstances affecting its contractual obligations. The company, part of Equinix, is a leading provider of data centre and connectivity solutions in Nigeria, Ghana, and Cote d’Ivoire.