WACS Down Hard: Turbidity Current Due To Heavy Rain Suspected
Heavy rains in Côte d'Ivoire likely caused rivers to dump large amounts of sediment at high speed into the Atlantic. These undersea mud Tsunamis accelerate down the deep gradient of the continental shelf off Abidjan and destroy anything in their path. In particular, they displace the sea floor up to several meters. It is likely that a turbidity current effectively disinterred the WACS trunk and severed it. The main value of WACS is moving traffic between Africa and Europe. So this outage imposes severe hardship on African ISPs. Outages off Côte d'Ivoire's shore are common and have disrupted Internet service in the country many times. For example, in 2024 a debris slide in the subterranean canyon off Abidjan took out four cables, including WACS. Côte d'Ivoire really needs high capacity fibre optic links into neighboring countries to better weather these network crises.