CS SOVEREIGN

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Two cable layers to repair cable breaks after suspected landslide

The 'Léon Thévenin' has arrived at the site of one of four major undersea fibre cable breaks. A second ship, Global Marine’s 'C.S. Sovereign', was en route too after after a suspected submarine landslide that knocked out four undersea cables on March 14, 2024, causing severe Internet disruptions in South Africa and all along Africa’s Western coast near Abidjan, breaking the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT-3. Due to the location and depth of the breaks, the cable owners have ruled out sabotage, stray boat anchors, and other human activity as possible causes for the outages. This left a submarine landslide as the most likely explanation. The cable breaks caused a roughly two-hour outage on Vodacom’s data network in South Africa. It also took down Microsoft’s locally hosted cloud services, preventing people from accessing their email, Teams meetings, and other Microsoft 365 services. The Microsoft Azure region in South Africa was also offline for several hours, leaving companies like payments provider Yoco unable to function. Services were restored after the impacted companies secured additional capacity on undersea cables that were still operational, like Google’s Equiano. Vodacom and Microsoft have not yet explained why a lack of international bandwidth also disrupted their local connectivity. Network infrastructure company WIOCC, an investor in WACS, has provided an update on the repairs to the four broken submarine cables. The 'Léon Thévenin'Ä set sail on March 19 from Cape Town. However, it will only attend to the SAT-3 break and reached the fault area on March 29. WACS is the more important cable for most South African network service providers, as the Telkom-controlled SAT-3 offers much less capacity. Regardless, it was expected that repairs to SAT-3 will be completed by the second week of April, barring any unforeseen circumstances. The 'C.S. Sovereign' will work on MainOne, WACS, and ACE with an ETA as of April 8. She had sailed from London on March 21, stopped in Brest on March 22 and sailed again on March 24. It paused again at Santa Cruz de Tenerife on March 3ß before leaving on April 1. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the expected restoration dates for the remaining cables are as follows: - ACE by April 17; WACS by April 28 and MainOne by May 9- While a submarine landslide was the suspected cause of the breaks, WIOCC said that no formal diagnosis of the cause has been possible.