My Internet Has Gone To The Pits
My Internet Has Gone To The Pits
Yours probably has too, if you're in Nigeria. This is everything I know, and when it ends.
Every Sunday evening,
will take a personal dive into the world of money and markets: see what’s happening, help you make sense of it, and tell you how it affects your bottom line. More about Bottom Line here.
I was watching Wes Anderson's Oscar-winning short film, “The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar,” last Thursday morning when it hit. Not only was my Netflix buffering, but my social media apps were also not loading.
I started calling people to see if it was just a me problem, and it turned out I wasn’t alone. The internet was down. The impact was instant and widespread, affecting people everywhere—if it relied on an internet connection, it felt the shock somehow.
, my editor, was also trying to sort out his bills. He needed to pay his plumber and AC guy, but his bank apps refused to load, and bank transfers were not working. People couldn’t open their work tools. Nothing seemed to work for everyone who used a Microsoft tool—Docs, Teams, Calls, Designers. Bank apps and ride-hailing services had been cut off from the internet.We were dealing with inflation, intense heat, poor electricity, and now an internet outage? Everything had gone to the pits. It wasn’t doomsday, but Thursday didn’t feel like 2024.
What’s happening to our internet?
Some subsea cables supplying internet to much of West Africa had been severed around Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire. Many countries across West Africa, including Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria, were affected—in Côte d'Ivoire, they were completely without internet. The undersea cables affected were the West African Cable System (WACS), African Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT 3, and the MainOne cable system. The MainOne cable network is a submarine cable stretching from Portugal to South Africa.
It’s bad, but how bad?
MTN, Africa's largest internet service provider (ISP), is connected to MainOne. MTN is my primary internet source, along with 290 million others, because, quite honestly, it’s everywhere you go. I could confirm that MTN users across West Africa and in South Africa were affected.
MainOne is one of the major internet service providers for people and companies. Every business in every sector that used MainOne—banks, fintech, media—was affected. One of the major companies affected was Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc, NIBBS. Simply put, they ensure that transactions happen almost instantly whenever you send money from one bank to another. To put NIBBS into context, they powered over 183 million transactions in February alone. But for a short time on Thursday, they were also down.
I asked an engineer who works for a Nigerian bank. He mentioned they were down for two hours at most because they had a backup system to fall back on. Most businesses didn’t.
It begs the question: how does the internet work?
The Internet is a network
Think of it like a postal service, but it delivers digital information instead of packages. I’ll start at the backbone: over 90% of all internet connectivity today is powered by a massive cable network deep in the oceans worldwide, laid by actual people. Imagine a network of 1.3 million km of cables at the bottom of the ocean—the backbone of the internet. Now, these cables branch out to deliver the internet into more localized regions. They carry the connection to local data centers. Then that’s further distributed to smaller cables (think of that digging project that’s happened somewhere in your city). Then it connects to your Service Providers, like MTN.
Then it arrives on your device. Some critical cables were cut off somewhere in the ocean before the internet branched inland to Nigeria and other African countries.
You’re probably wondering, “What does it have to do with my Bottom Line?”
It’s already affected my productivity, for starters. Most of my friends and I barely got anything done on Thursday. I wrote this from my friend’s house because they have better internet; they use Glo, which has cable and wasn’t affected. I’ve had to re-subscribe to Glo, and my internet was back to life.
This means I'll have to spend extra money buying more internet options to surf and get work done. Apart from Glo, another failsafe option people have resorted to is the Starlink Network.
Starlink users are completely unaffected. Take this user, Ezra, who has not had to worry about the downtime: “It’s a worthwhile investment if you care enough about staying connected at home.”
Starlink is a satellite internet product built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Instead of physical cables running under the sea, Starlink transmits internet data through radio waves from satellites in space. It’s dependable, it’s stable, but it’s also expensive. If you bought this in October 2023, it would cost you ₦338,000. Today, it’d cost you hanging out on a waitlist while costing you more than double at ₦800,000. You’ll still pay a monthly subscription of ₦38,000, but window shopping is free.
When will this end?
I went looking for other examples of cable cuts in the past. In December 2008, the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable, which connects Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe, was damaged by a ship's anchor lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. It took about two weeks to repair the cable and restore connectivity to affected regions.
In 2011, there was a cable break in the AAG (Asia and American Gateway) submarine cable system that directly links Southeast Asia and the U.S. It also took 2 weeks to restore full internet capacity. In 2020, there were three cable breaks in Africa, including a breakdown in the South African Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT3/WACS) cable system linking Portugal and Spain. The WACS cable system that connects South Africa to the United Kingdom was also affected. The restoration of the cable break took well over a month. MainOne might take five weeks to fix, and we’ll have to wait with bated bits.
The inconvenience intensifies with each passing day. How much more will you spend on getting better internet? And how many more hours of work will have to go to waste? I’m wondering what the solution is. Beyond finding alternatives, how can this not happen again? It’s not about becoming less dependent on the internet; it’s about finding more cut-free options. The internet is a lifeline in the modern economy.
It takes 10 minutes for the brain to be starved of oxygen to die. Look at what the internet did to us in only a few hours.
The new week is here. I’ll be spending mine doing a lot of market runs while trying to answer one question: Why did things get so expensive?
I hope you have a great week and the vim to win.
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