The Strait of Malacca connects Thailand and Sumatra, linking the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean’s South China Sea. It’s a major thoroughfare for global trade and a hotspot for piracy. That’s a massive problem, given that its 14 undersea cable crossings process 114 terabits (14 250 gigabytes) of data every day. Given the global reliance on internet traffic, damage or disruption to any (let alone all) of those cables would have a disastrous impact on the region.

Which is exactly what happened, eight times in 2023 alone. The economic damage was estimated at as much as US$4.5 trillion (ZAR79 trillion).

Closer to home, Africa has the same vulnerability. This past March, internet services in Somalia and parts of East Africa were disrupted when one of the cables in the PEACE (Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe) network was damaged in the Red Sea. In June it was South Africa’s turn, as a fault near Swakopmund, Namibia, knocked the West Africa Cable System (WACS) offline.
The effects of a subsea cable outage go far beyond your laggy Teams meetings or patchy Internet connection.

Telecoms company Seacom operates a fibre-optic cable that runs from the seaside village of Mtunzini in KwaZulu-Natal to a point of presence in Marseille, France. Between July and December 2024, Seacom contributed ZAR2 million to its part-owner Remgro’s headline earnings – 94% less than the ZAR32 million it contributed over the same six months in 2023. The reason for the disappointing returns? Cable repair costs linked to an incident in May 2024, which saw all subsea internet capacity between South Africa and eastern Africa going offline due to faults on the Seacom and Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) cables.

‘While satellites and wireless networks offer some redundancy, subsea cables remain the backbone of global connectivity,’ says Alpheus Mangale, Seacom Group CEO. ‘Beneath our oceans, over 600 subsea cables – stretching over 1.4 million kilometres – carry 97% of the world’s internet traffic. These fibre-optic cables enable over US$10 trillion (ZAR175 trillion) in financial transactions daily and form the digital economy’s backbone.’

Since the mid-1990s, well in excess of 1 million kilometres of deep-sea submarine cables (enough to wrap around the equator 40 times) have been laid across the world’s seabeds. Inside those cables are optic fibres, about the width of a human hair, which carry data in the form of light signals across the planet, allowing you to hold your Teams meeting, text your spouse or ask an AI assistant to check your Manco report.

Mangale says that while the demand for connectivity is skyrocketing – the submarine cable market is expected to grow from US$18.28 billion in 2023 to US$33.29 billion – that expansion has not been matched with the necessary security measures.

‘We need to rethink how we protect this infrastructure before the cracks in our digital foundation become full-blown fractures,’ he says. ‘We assume the internet will always be there. Still, without urgent action to protect subsea cables, we risk a future where con-nectivity is unstable, vulnerable to attacks and controlled by a few influential players. Governments, industry leaders and telecom providers must act now to safeguard the digital economy and ensure internet access remains open, secure and resilient.’

But those risks come with vast opportunity. Djibouti is harnessing its strategic location on the Horn of Africa, at the junction of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, to position itself as a global digital gateway. The country has committed more than US$200 million to the deployment of 12 submarine cables. ‘Our strategy in Djibouti is built on stability. We have established ourselves as a regional hub not just for shipping, but also for data. Our undersea cables carry the information that drives global trade,’ said Prime Minister Abdoulkader Kamil Mohamed.

Djibouti is at the heart of the Eastern Africa Regional Digital Integration Project, which aims to enhance digital connectivity for more than 40 million people within its borders and in neighbouring Ethiopia.

According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), evidence from Africa suggests that when fast internet landed on the continent via the first submarine connections, employment rates rose by up to 13%, while improved firm productivity in manufacturing sectors also increased by 13%. ‘It also supported shifts towards higher-skill occupations and reduced job inequality,’ said the IFC.

The IFC expects more subsea cables to be deployed as the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) ‘increase[s] the world’s insatiable demand for data’. However, it warns, much of the investment in global data infrastructure has ‘focused on strengthening existing links between already well-connected areas, particularly between North America, Europe and East Asia’.

‘Africa and Latin America, although better connected than in the past, still have far fewer direct links to major data hubs,’ the IFC warns.

Africa especially needs more subsea cables, linked to more domestic data centres, to close the widening gap in digital access. The problem, it says, is not that broadband connections aren’t available, but ‘because they are still an expensive luxury’. It points out that sub-Saharan Africa has some of the highest internet prices of any region in the world. ‘A fixed internet subscription there costs nearly a fifth of an average monthly income,’ it says.

Several landmark projects are under way to change that, including Google’s Umoja cable, which will link South Africa to Australia; and Meta’s ambitious, multibillion-dollar, multi-year Project Waterworth, which will reach five major continents and span more than 50 000 km, connecting the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa and other key regions.

Africa desperately needs projects like these. While the continent is linked to 74 submarine cable systems, only 50 of those are currently active (the other 24 are still under construction). And many African countries – such as Togo, Liberia and Sierra Leone – rely on only one or two cables, which leaves them especially vulnerable to disruptions.

Global thinktank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace highlighted this risk in a recent paper. ‘Even with 37 of Africa’s 38 coastal states connected to at least one subsea cable, a lack of diverse routes raises the risk of internet outages when disruptions occur,’ it warns. ‘This risk is particularly high for countries that only have one cable landing, including Guinea, Guinea Bissau, the Gambia, Liberia and Mauritania. Furthermore, of the approximately 80 cable repair ships scattered across the globe, only three serve the African continent – and only one of those vessels is based at an African port.’

For now, Africa’s major subsea cable landing points are roughly the same as its old trading ports in Egypt, Djibouti, South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. As the continent continues to connect, Africa will have to expand its subsea cable capacity before taking its next great leap: connecting its vast interior to strategically placed data centres.

By Mark van Dijk
Images: Gallo/Getty Images