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WACS (West Africa Cable System)

The West Africa Cable System (WACS) is a ~14,500 km submarine fibre-optic cable that runs along Africa's western coast, connecting 12 landing stations from the UK and Portugal down through West and Central Africa to South Africa. Operational since May 2012, WACS is one of the primary international Internet links for several West African countries that have limited terrestrial bypass or alternative subsea-cable options.

External reference: submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/west-africa-cable-system-wacs.

Landing stations (selected)

WACS lands at stations in multiple countries along the African west coast, including:

  • Portugal (Seixal) — European endpoint
  • United Kingdom (Highbridge) — European endpoint
  • Canary Islands — Atlantic intermediate stop
  • Cape Verde
  • Senegal (Dakar)
  • Ivory Coast (Abidjan)
  • Ghana (Accra)
  • Nigeria (Lagos)
  • Cameroon (Douala)
  • Republic of Congo (Pointe-Noire) / Democratic Republic of Congo
  • Angola (Sangano)
  • Namibia (Swakopmund)
  • South Africa (Yzerfontein) — southern terminus

For several of these countries, WACS is a primary or near-sole international capacity path, making a WACS incident into a country-scale connectivity event.

2026-01-02 cable incident (canonical instance)

Just after the 2026 new year, WACS sustained "an international incident" that disrupted capacity in the Republic of Congo (and likely other countries along the route; the Cloudflare Radar review focuses on Congo's impact):

  • Start: ~00:00 local on January 2 (23:00 UTC on January 1).
  • Attribution: Congo Telecom (AS37451) posted on X confirming "an international incident on the WACS cable" and stating that "backup solutions had been activated."
  • Impact magnitude: Cloudflare Radar observed traffic from Congo drop to 82% below expected levels.
  • Mitigation: Backup transit solutions (presumably alternate submarine cables or satellite) were activated, but with less headroom than primary WACS capacity — users experienced "slowdowns during peak hours" during the rerouted window.
  • Recovery: Traffic returned to expected levels by approximately 15:00 local on January 4 (14:00 UTC) — ~63 hours after the initial drop.

The Cloudflare Radar review doesn't attribute the cable incident's root cause (ship anchor, subsea landslide, landing station equipment failure, deliberate damage); that level of detail usually surfaces from cable consortium maintenance notices rather than from traffic observability.

Why WACS matters for Internet resilience in West Africa

Countries along the WACS route vary widely in their bypass options:

  • South Africa has multiple competing cables (SEACOM, EASSy, Equiano, ACE, SAT-3), so a WACS incident produces minimal country-level impact.
  • Countries further north on the route (particularly inland or less-peered nations) have fewer alternatives, so WACS incidents produce national-scale connectivity shocks.
  • The Republic of Congo falls into the less-redundant category — hence the 82% traffic drop following the January 2 WACS incident.

For countries in the less-redundant category, WACS incidents are recurrent national-scale risks. Reliability engineering at the country level depends on submarine-cable diversification decisions taken over a multi-year horizon, not on real-time failover primitives within individual ISPs.

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