When a Belize-flagged, UK-registered cargo ship known as the Rubymar was struck by a Houthi missile within the Crimson Sea in February 2024, it started to float. With its anchor down in shallow water, it severed three of the area’s subsea cables earlier than sinking on 2 March – amongst them was Seacom, the primary privately owned subsea system to land on Africa’s east coast in 2009.
In line with Richard Schumacher, MD of digital infrastructure at Seacom, the outage taught his firm and the trade a lesson that every one technical leaders on the continent ought to heed.
“I feel all the trade awakened – not simply Seacom. It was actually the primary of many occurrences the place everybody realised what disruption really means to the worldwide web,” Schumacher stated in an interview with TechCentral.
“We’ve entered an period the place our digital economies can’t afford to be down for any motive in any way.”
The outage price Seacom dearly. Seacom’s contribution to majority shareholder Remgro’s headline earnings fell about 78% that monetary 12 months. Restore to the severed cables was delayed for months by battle within the Crimson Sea and visitors needed to be rerouted up Africa’s west coast by means of Google’s Equiano in addition to the Peace and Wacs cables.
Geopolitical threats like the continued conflict within the Center East proceed to be a risk to connectivity in Africa, particularly alongside the continent’s east coast. In line with Paul Brodsky, senior analysis supervisor at undersea cable map specialist TeleGeography, any closure of the Strait of Hormuz wouldn’t pose a big danger to connectivity in Africa. Nevertheless, threats by Yemeni Houthi rebels in March 2026 to hitch the battle, probably bringing the closure of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait into the dialogue, pose a extra substantial danger. Once more, redundancy by way of cables on Africa’s west coast has mitigated that danger considerably.
Crimson Sea danger
“The overwhelming majority of Africa’s inter-regional connectivity runs to Europe, so the Persian Gulf itself isn’t crucial to Africa connectivity. The Crimson Sea is extraordinarily related, nevertheless. It gives a crucial pathway for cables operating to Europe from the east coast of Africa and from the Persian Gulf and Asia. Cable outages within the southern Crimson Sea have gotten increasingly more troublesome to restore attributable to political instability in Yemen,” stated Brodsky.
“That stated, the extra cables up the west coast of Africa have confirmed helpful, as some visitors that’s usually routed up the east coast by means of the Crimson Sea has been rerouted alongside west coast cables.”
Learn: South Africa is quickly turning into a hyperconnected nation
Seacom’s Schumacher stated the redundancy on the first mile ought to be mirrored in terrestrial middle-mile and last-mile connectivity. In South Africa, he stated, the primary mile is in affordable form. Cables land at Mtunzini in KwaZulu-Natal, and at Yzerfontein and Melkbosstrand on the Cape west coast, with a number of homeowners taking totally different geographical routes. Google’s Equiano is touchdown within the Jap Cape and Seacom 2.0 is planning not less than two South African landings.
The center mile is the place the hole exhibits up most acutely on the continent. Of the 77 subsea cable programs now touching Africa, just one sea-facing African nation, Eritrea, stays unconnected – however Schumacher stated the statistic flatters the image.
“Any subsea cable system touchdown on a continent is ineffective, completely ineffective, except you may take the visitors and information packets inland to companies and finish customers. We’ve got accomplished nicely in South Africa, for instance, however we nonetheless have to allow ourselves to take that visitors into the likes of Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and different landlocked nations,” stated Schumacher.
However even the place the middle- and last-mile layers exist in abundance, firms should make deliberate efforts to make the most of them by constructing redundancy into their networks. Schumacher warned that for a lot of firms, redundancy seems like an choice when issues run easily, with the necessity for it solely turning into pronounced when a disruption happens.
The dangers are manifold, with operational, monetary and reputational harm on the road. Transactions may be halted and clients annoyed, resulting in losses in income, service-level settlement penalties, inefficiencies and long-term hurt to belief and popularity.
Learn: Extra particulars emerge on large new Seacom cable
“It wouldn’t be smart for any community operator or client of that community to have single paths when it comes to connectivity. Actually what meaning is having one connection into your premises. If there was a failure, and it’s a single level of failure, it could possibly be detrimental to your operations and your small business, and that’s actually a enterprise danger,” stated Schumacher. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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