Synopsis
Internet access to the west African countries -- Nigeria, Niger, Togo and Benin -- was disrupted due to damage to the South Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable. The news was reported by BBC, Aljazeera and other agencies. The worst affected countries are being reported to be Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Benin. 70% of Nigeria's Internet bandwidth is reported to be cut where as Togo and Niger are completely offline. On the otherhand Benin has been reported to be back online by rerouting its traffic via its neighbouring countries.
We studied the performance measurements as gathered by the PingER projectand noticed that the affects of the outage could be observed from 24th of July and onwards. However most of the monitored sites were back online by 3rd of August.
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Please note that our monitoring site at SLAC was down for maintenance between 28th of July to 1st of August, 2009.
Average Round Trip Time and Packet Loss
From the Average RTT (ms) and Packet Loss (%) measurements shown below we notice that all the observed sites show affects following 24th of July. Some sites show complete outage, such as Togo and Benin, where as others show sharp degradation in performance. Togo and Benin seem to have recovered by 27th of July. They did experience another outage sometime between 2nd and 4th of August. They do seem to have returned to normalcy since 4th of August, 2009.
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