Undersea cable linking Africa to Asia back to full capacity

Mauritius Telecom, the Indian Ocean island nation’s telecommunications operator, said internet and television services are back to normal after a “technical problem” with an undersea cable.

The South Africa Far East submarine cable has returned to full capacity, Mauritius Telecom said in an emailed statement late Friday.

“There has been a perturbation in the service on the traffic transiting through the SAFE cable,” the company said. “The SAFE cable hasn’t been damaged.”

Earlier on Friday the company said the undersea cable had been damaged, relaying an initial diagnostic of the consortium owning the infrastructure.

In a separate statement, SBM Bank (Mauritius), the country’s second biggest lender, said all automated teller-machines and point-of-sale terminals are up and running, following restoration of internet connectivity.

The 13,500 kilometer-long (8,388.5 miles) SAFE fiber cable is one of three connecting Mauritius, an island-nation with close to 1.3 million people and an economy mostly dependent on financial services and tourism.

The cable belongs to a consortium of companies that includes Mauritius Telecom, Vodafone Group Plc, and Orange SA, among others.

The short-lived disruption nonetheless highlights the vulnerability of critical communications infrastructure. It comes at a time when several other major internet cables are already damaged off the continent’s west coast and in the Red Sea.

Four cables were damaged near the Ivory Coast last month after seismic activity in the region, with repairs ongoing. Three additional cables off the coast of Yemen have been offline since late February after they were severed by a cargo ship sunk by Houthi militants, Bloomberg previously reported. The company responsible for the repair of those cables is still waiting for a permit to work in Yemeni waters, one of the cable operators, Seacom Ltd., told Bloomberg.