The Seacom outage in the Red Sea has become a defining reminder of how fragile Africa’s digital backbone can be when geopolitics and critical infrastructure collide. What began in February 2024 with a Belize-flagged, UK-registered cargo ship, the Rubymar, being hit by a Houthi missile ended up triggering a far wider lesson for the continent’s connectivity sector.
The vessel drifted after the attack, then sat with its anchor down in shallow water before cutting through three subsea cables. It eventually sank on 2 March 2024, and among the damaged systems was Seacom, the pioneering privately owned subsea cable system that first landed on Africa’s east coast in 2009. For the industry, it was not just another outage. It was a warning shot.
According to Richard Schumacher, group chief strategic alliance officer at Seacom, the incident forced operators, governments and network planners to confront a hard truth: digital resilience can no longer be treated as a luxury. Speaking to TechCentral, Schumacher said the whole industry had to wake up to the realities of disruption, not only Seacom itself.
“I think the entire industry woke up – not just Seacom. It was really the first of many occurrences where everyone realised what disruption actually means to the worldwide internet,” Schumacher said.
He added that the stakes are now higher than ever because African economies depend more heavily on always-on digital infrastructure than they did even a few years ago. “We’ve entered an era where our digital economies cannot afford to be down for any reason whatsoever.”
The commercial impact on Seacom was severe. In the financial year affected by the outage, Seacom’s contribution to majority shareholder Remgro’s headline earnings fell by about 78%. Repairs were not immediate either. Conflict in the Red Sea delayed restoration for months, leaving operators to reroute traffic and keep services alive through other systems.
That rerouting shifted some of the burden to Africa’s west coast, where traffic was sent via Google’s Equiano, Peace and Wacs. The fact that alternative routes existed helped cushion the blow, but it also exposed how dependent the east coast remains on a narrow and vulnerable corridor through the Red Sea.
Geopolitical instability continues to cast a long shadow over the region. Paul Brodsky, senior research manager at subsea cable specialist TeleGeography, has warned that while a potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz would not be a major connectivity threat for Africa, the situation is different around the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.
That waterway matters because it sits on one of the world’s most important internet arteries. If conflict in the region worsens, especially with Yemeni Houthi rebels threatening to widen the war, cable routes through the southern Red Sea could come under even greater pressure. Still, Brodsky noted that the presence of west coast systems has provided a valuable pressure valve.
Seacom outage exposes Africa’s connectivity weak spots
“The vast majority of Africa’s inter-regional connectivity runs to Europe, so the Persian Gulf itself is not critical to Africa connectivity. The Red Sea is extremely relevant, however. It provides a critical pathway for cables running to Europe from the east coast of Africa and from the Persian Gulf and Asia. Cable outages in the southern Red Sea are becoming more and more difficult to repair due to political instability in Yemen,” Brodsky said.
He added that additional infrastructure along Africa’s west coast has already proven its worth, allowing some traffic that would normally travel north via the east coast to be diverted instead. For operators and businesses alike, that kind of geographic redundancy is becoming essential.
Schumacher agreed, but said the same thinking must also apply further down the chain. In South Africa, the first mile is relatively healthy. The country already has major landing points at Mtunzini in KwaZulu-Natal, Yzerfontein and Melkbosstrand on the Cape west coast, while Google’s Equiano is landing in the Eastern Cape and Seacom 2.0 is expected to bring at least two South African landings.
But the bigger challenge, he argued, lies in the middle mile and beyond. That is where the continent still struggles to move traffic efficiently from landing stations into businesses, towns and households. In Schumacher’s view, a subsea cable landing by itself means very little if the inland network is weak or incomplete.
He pointed to Africa’s growing subsea inventory as evidence of progress. There are now 77 subsea cable systems touching the continent, and Eritrea is the only sea-facing African country still without a connection. But Schumacher said that statistic can be misleading if it is read as proof that the continent has solved its connectivity problem.
“Any subsea cable system landing on a continent is useless, absolutely useless, unless you can take the traffic and data packets inland to businesses and end users,” he said.
He argued that South Africa has made solid progress, but that the region still needs to do far more to extend reliable connectivity into Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and other landlocked neighbours. Without that backbone, the benefits of international bandwidth stop too close to the coast.
The business case for redundancy is also becoming impossible to ignore. Schumacher warned that companies often think about resilience only after a failure has already happened. When networks are running smoothly, duplicate paths can feel like an unnecessary expense. But once something goes wrong, the cost of a single point of failure becomes painfully clear.
For companies that rely on continuous connectivity, the consequences can be immediate and expensive. Transactions can stop, customer service can collapse, service-level agreements can be breached, and the knock-on effect on trust can linger long after the outage is fixed. In a market where digital uptime is tied directly to revenue, the risks are no longer theoretical.
Schumacher’s message is simple: network resilience must be built in from the start, not added later as a crisis response. A single connection into a business premises may look efficient on paper, but if that line fails, the damage can be operational as well as financial.
As we reported earlier, the Seacom outage was more than a technical event. It was a stress test for Africa’s internet infrastructure and a reminder that the continent’s digital future will depend not just on more cables, but on smarter routing, better inland networks and real redundancy. In a world where geopolitical shocks can ripple straight into boardrooms and bank apps, the lesson from the Red Sea is one South African operators cannot afford to forget.