Fibre Cut or Outage: What Caused Kenya’s Tuesday Internet Disruption?

 

A man experiences internet disruption  

In this digital age, millions of people depend on steady internet access for their daily activities and any disruption in the connection can be a great inconvenience. Kenyans were angered by slow internet speeds. Image for illustration. This explains why some people in Kenya and her neighbouring states were up in arms on the evening of Tuesday, June 25, after the countries were hit by slow internet speed and intermittency.  According to NetBlocks, an internet observatory firm, the disruption on Tuesday affected several other East African states, including Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. In Kenya, leading telecommunications firms issued statements explaining the cause of the disruption, but some quarters were unconvinced as it came in the wake of heated anti-Finance Bill 2024 demonstrations. They accused the telcos of the deliberate shutdown of the internet. But what really happened? This piece seeks to demystify the issue and clear the swirling assertions surrounding the Tuesday disruption. Difference between fibre cut and fibre outage The two principal causes of internet connection disruptions are fibre cuts and outages. While the two terms look similar and are often used interchangeably, they are distinct. Fibre outage Fibre outage simply means reduced internet traffic flow along the supply cables. For example, the provider may push 50 gigabits on normal occasions, but during an outage, they push around 20 gigabits, leading to a deficit. While at it, the number of users remains the same. This results in periodic disconnections and slowdowns in internet speed, leading to buffering and web pages taking longer to load than usual. Notably, digital infrastructure firm Seacom confirmed the Tuesday interruption was caused by an undersea cable outage and announced that normal speeds had been restored on Seacom Internet cable. Speaking to Business Daily, Seacom said it lost capacity on a few of the cables through which it powers its corporate customers. This resulted in the degradation of their Internet Protocol Multi-Protocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS), a routing system that enables fast data switching from one node to the next. Outages can be caused by various reasons, such as network congestion. In this case, a higher internet traffic demand can overwhelm the supply cables, leading to slowdowns.  On Tuesday, there was a higher internet demand than usual following the demonstrations and the ensuing tension as most people were following the occurrences online. Other causes of outages include electricity blackouts, hardware and software glitches, and cyber attacks, in which numerous systems flood the network with traffic that overwhelms the servers. In case of an outage, telcos activate redundancy measures to address the disruption. Fibre cuts On the other hand, fibre cuts occur when physical damage occurs to the undersea cables that deliver internet to the country, as witnessed in May. When a cut occurs, unlike an outage, there is complete disruption of internet services in the affected area as the internet cannot flow through damaged infrastructure. The damage may be caused by among others, vandalism and natural disasters such as earthquakes and underwater landslides. Here, the technicians have to repair the cables to restore connectivity. Following the fibre cuts, providers may be forced to get their supply from alternative supply firms. From the discussions above, the Tuesday interruption was caused by a fibre outage and not a deliberate cut, as widely claimed. 

by  Japhet Ruto