{"id":2374,"date":"2024-12-01T17:41:16","date_gmt":"2024-12-01T17:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=2374"},"modified":"2024-12-01T17:41:16","modified_gmt":"2024-12-01T17:41:16","slug":"subsea-cables-html","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=2374","title":{"rendered":"Undersea Surgeons – The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
One morning last March, tens of millions of people in West Africa woke up to find they had no more internet.<\/p>\n
Hospitals were shut out of patient records.<\/p>\n
Business owners couldn\u2019t pay wages.<\/p>\n
In homes and on sidewalks, people stared at the wheel icon rolling endlessly on their screens. \u201cConnecting,\u201d it promised.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
People remained disconnected \u2014 some for hours, many for days.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt created panic all over,\u201d said Kwabena Agadzi, head of communication technology at one of Ghana\u2019s largest insurance companies, Starlife. \u201cAs if the world was coming to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the absence of hard information, rumors flew. It was a coup, some said. It was sabotage, said others.<\/p>\n
Even those who guessed what was really happening knew that identifying the problem and fixing it were two very different things.<\/p>\n
The Trou Sans Fond<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Despite its name, the Trou Sans Fond \u2014 the Bottomless Hole, in French \u2014 a sinuous canyon carved into the continental shelf off Ivory Coast, does have a bottom. It\u2019s just very, very deep down.<\/p>\n
The chasm begins near the coastline with a precipitous drop of nearly 3,000 feet.<\/p>\n <\/figure>\n
Nested in the murky water at the bottom, at times some two miles deep, and buffeted by powerful currents lie cables that provide internet service across West Africa. Many nations use cables like these, but for emerging economies with limited alternatives, they are a lifeline to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
It can be easy to forget this.<\/p>\n
For most people, the internet may be indispensable, but they take it for granted. Though it is sometimes described as the world\u2019s biggest machine, few spare a thought for its physical core: the vast networks of cables spun across sea floors and continents, the cities of energy-hungry servers speeding along data.<\/p>\n
Until there is a problem.<\/p>\n
On the morning of March 14, there was a big one. Cables on the floor of the Trou Sans Fond began going offline. When the fourth went out, some five hours after the first, people in a dozen countries got an unwelcome reminder: No one is truly untethered.<\/p>\n\n
\n
\n
\n
A city in Ivory Coast, a few months before the internet went out.<\/p>\n
Joao Silva\/The New York Times<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
\u201c\u200b\u200bThe more we rely on our phones to get everything done, the more we forget how we connect,\u201d said Jennifer Counter, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. \u201cBut there\u2019s still a cable somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some know this all too well. When cables malfunction, it is their job to wrest them from the muck of the seabed, splice them together and lower them back down, thrumming once again with data.<\/p>\n
And so the day after the trouble at the bottom of the Bottomless Hole, the L\u00e9on Th\u00e9venin, a 41-year-old, 107-meter repair ship based in Cape Town, South Africa, prepared to set sail. Ahead lay a voyage of about 10 days up Africa\u2019s western coast.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Life Without Internet<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Any number of things can knock an undersea cable out of service.<\/p>\n
Landslides can do it. So can a ship dragging its anchor. There may be unintended damage from military skirmishes. And then there is sabotage, a growing concern.<\/p>\n
But most components of the physical internet are privately owned, and the companies behind them have very little incentive to explain any failures. That can make it daunting for people who rely on the cables to try to get a handle on why an outage is happening. Especially in real time.<\/p>\n
On March 14, the regional chief information officer for the Ecobank Group in Ivory Coast knew only one thing for sure as he stared at signals blipping red in his offices: There was a problem.<\/p>\n
Still, it was early in the day. Banks were not due to open for another 30 minutes. That was probably enough time, figured the information officer, Issouf Nikiema, for his I.T. engineers to sort it out.<\/p>\n
Those hopes faded when the techs came back to his office in Abidjan. \u201cEven their body language \u2014 I realized that something was really wrong,\u201d Mr. Nikiema said.<\/p>\n
Ecobank alone serves 28 million people across the continent. But many other businesses, from sprawling bank chains to modest food stands, were hit, especially after the fourth cable went out and the internet went into freefall.<\/p>\n
Africa is a continent of 1.4 billion people where economic ambitions are high but the infrastructure often lags. People have learned the art of the workaround, and so when the electricity fails, generators often come to the rescue. If the WiFi goes down, mobile data might still do the trick.<\/p>\n
But this time was different. In many places, the shutdown was total.<\/p>\n
\u201cImagine waking up in New York with no WiFi at home, no data on your phone, no internet available at your local Starbucks, at your office, no way to check your bank accounts on your Chase app,\u201d said Sarah Coulibaly, a technology expert at Ivory Coast\u2019s national telecommunications agency.<\/p>\n
In Accra, Ghana\u2019s capital, international travelers arriving at the airport could not locate their rental cars.<\/p>\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Internet traffic to Ghana<\/h3>\n
Four cables broke on March 14, 2024<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
Note: All times for the four cable breaks are in UTC. The chart shows changes in internet traffic over time, rather than displaying total internet usage levels.<\/p>\n
In Abidjan, Ivory Coast\u2019s largest city, restaurants couldn\u2019t use WhatsApp to order local produce.<\/p>\n
And more than 500 miles away in Ibadan, Nigeria\u2019s third-largest city, Oke Iyanda couldn\u2019t collect money for the food that she sells to students and university workers. Sales of abula, a popular mix of yam powder, vegetables, pepper stew and goat meat, plummeted and food spoiled.<\/p>\n
The failures highlighted a broader problem for African countries: For all their techological progress, they are served by far fewer cables than more developed countries are, and often lack backup systems.<\/p>\n
By contrast, when two data cables linking four European countries were cut in quick succession in the Baltic Sea earlier this month, service interruptions were relatively minimal. (American intelligence officials assessed that the cables had not been cut deliberately, but the European authorities have not ruled out sabotage.)<\/p>\n
For Africa, some help is on the way. Starlink\u2019s satellite internet technology now operates in at least 15 countries, and a 28,000-mile-long cable being built by a consortium of companies has begun to come online. Still, the continent\u2019s dependence on private \u2014 and for the most part Western \u2014 internet providers can make true sovereignty elusive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re at the mercy of these cable operators,\u201d said Kalil Konat\u00e9, Ivory Coast’s minister for digital transition.<\/p>\n
For an Uber driver in, say, Stockholm or Buenos Aires, an internet outage is a big inconvenience. In Lagos, Nigeria\u2019s largest city, it can mean calamity. With his clients locked out of their bank accounts, one driver there, Segun Oladejoye, said he went without work for three days.<\/p>\n\n
\n
\n
\n
In Lagos, Nigeria, as in much of West Africa, merchants rely on the internet to conduct daily transactions.<\/p>\n
Taiwo Aina for The New York Times<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
The timing could hardly have been worse. Months earlier, Mr. Oladejoye, a 46-year-old father of four, had taken out a loan for his Uber car. With barely any savings, the only way he could pay back the $30 weekly installment and feed his family was through even longer hours of work.<\/p>\n
Worried that the lending company might seize his car, Mr. Oladejoye said, he borrowed still more money, this time from a Chinese lending app. \u201cIt still hurts me and my family,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause I now have to pay back both loans.\u201d<\/p>\n