Undersea Cable Failures Leave South Africa's Businesses Scrambling for Internet Access

South Africa’s Digital Economy Depends on Cables Beneath the Ocean

When West African submarine cables failed in March 2024, South Africa’s internet ground into crisis. The WACS, SAT-3, ACE and MainOne systems all went down, and repair timelines stretched across weeks. Businesses relying on cloud services, financial transactions and real-time communications faced a stark choice: wait for restoration or scramble for alternatives. For many, there were no alternatives. The outage hit 13 African countries, but the lesson it carried was specific: a country’s real vulnerability is not how much traffic crosses the ocean, but what happens in the hours and weeks after a cable fails.

Cables do fail, routinely. Most failures trace back to something as mundane as fishing gear or a ship’s anchor. The International Telecommunication Union estimates that submarine cables carry around 99 percent of the world’s internet traffic, including the financial transactions, cloud computing and government communications that modern economies depend on. South Africa connects to that system through 11 subsea cables across nine international cable systems: WACS, SAT-3/WASC, SAFE, SEACOM, EASSy, METISS, ACE, Equiano and 2Africa. TeleGeography’s 2026 submarine cable map counts 694 cable systems and 1,893 landing stations worldwide.

Dependence on this system is not, in itself, a vulnerability. Every open economy depends on subsea cables. The vulnerability lies in what happens when that dependence goes unmanaged. The March 2024 outage made this plain: countries with route diversity and operational readiness experienced slower internet. Countries without them faced a business continuity crisis. Resilience is not measured by how many cables land on your shores. It is measured by how quickly traffic reroutes when one breaks, and how quickly the break is repaired.

More capacity is coming. The 2Africa system, activated at the end of 2025, connects 33 countries across three continents with up to 180 Tbps on its main trunks, and its Pearls extension is scheduled for 2026. Google’s Umoja system is expected to link Africa directly to Australia across the Indian Ocean in 2026 or 2027. SEACOM has announced SEACOM 2.0, a planned 48-fibre-pair system built for AI, cloud and real-time data. Each new system adds redundancy, competition and bandwidth. But capacity is not resilience. This is where public conversation about connectivity usually stops one layer too early.

A subsea cable’s value is realised or wasted onshore. At a cable landing station, international capacity becomes national capacity. Everything depends on what stands behind that station: backhaul into the national network, diversity of inland routes, round-the-clock monitoring, wet plant spares, testing capability, clean handover to service providers, and the ability to respond when something breaks. Strip those away and a landing station is just a building on a beach. A cable is worth exactly what the network behind it can do with it, and no more.

Openserve, Telkom’s infrastructure business, operates strategic cable landing infrastructure at Melkbosstrand and Yzerfontein on the Atlantic seaboard and at Mtunzini on the Indian Ocean coast. That two-ocean geography matters. It is the first and most fundamental form of redundancy, allowing traffic to shift between east- and west-coast routes when a system on one side fails. Beyond South Africa’s shores, Openserve is one of the major service providers to submarine cables reaching Africa south of the equator. Telkom maintains the spares, repair kits and service gear that keep those systems running for the continent’s cable operators.

Resilience is not created during an outage. It is created in the years before one, in the spares held ready, the routes pre-planned, and the disciplines maintained when nothing is wrong.

This explains why Telkom occupies a different position from a mobile operator, a fibre provider or an enterprise technology company. The chain carrying international capacity into a South African business or home sits within one group: landing infrastructure, a national fibre network now beyond 180,000 kilometres, wholesale access, more than 7,000 integrated 4.5G mobile sites, and the enterprise and IT capability of BCX. That matters for a practical reason. Infrastructure usually fails at the handover points, where one party’s accountability ends and another’s begins. When the layers of the chain share a parent, accountability for continuity does not fragment at precisely the moments it is needed most.

Meanwhile, the stakes keep rising. Reuters reported in 2025 that Africa still accounts for less than 1 percent of global data centre capacity, while mobile data usage on the continent grows by roughly 40 percent a year. More of that data will be processed locally and regionally over time, but local processing deepens rather than removes the dependence on international connectivity. AI adoption runs on offshore cloud computing power. Cloud regions synchronise with each other across oceans. A “local” digital service is usually local only at its last mile; everything upstream crosses the seabed.

For business leaders and policymakers, the conclusion is straightforward: subsea resilience should be treated as economic infrastructure, with the same seriousness given to ports and power. This means protection of cable corridors, investment in repair and restoration capability, and deliberate diversity in landing geography and inland routes. South Africa starts with real advantages: two oceans, established landing infrastructure on both, and a national network deep enough to absorb and reroute international capacity at scale.

South Africa’s digital future rests on a longer chain than most people see. The question worth asking now is whether the investment, the spares, and the operational discipline required to keep that chain intact are receiving the same attention as the cables themselves.