Microsoft recently notified customers of a delay in repairing four undersea cables that went offline on Thursday afternoon. Meanwhile, the company has redirected traffic to restore functionality to its cloud platforms in South Africa.
This delay follows a significant outage near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, which affected the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT–3 cables. The exact cause of the disruption remains unclear.
WIOCC, a key player in African undersea cables since the launch of EASSy in 2010, is focusing on transferring affected clients to other subsea systems it operates, such as EASSy and Equiano.
Telkom’s Openserve division also confirmed cable failures but couldn’t provide further details.
Despite Microsoft’s assurance of mitigation, delays in repairing the West Africa fibre cables have hindered resolution efforts. Additionally, ongoing cable cuts in the Red Sea are impacting East Africa’s network capacity.
However, Microsoft notes improvements in the region’s overall network health and the restoration of many Azure services to normal levels. Users may already notice significant improvements.
As someone responsible for enterprise IT infrastructure at a major company, this undersea cable issue that affected Microsoft has me incredibly worried about the potential for cascading impacts and prolonged downtime.
For businesses running critical workloads in Azure or Microsoft’s cloud services, even component-level internet disruptions like this can be devastating if not properly mitigated. And based on the latest updates, Microsoft still seems to be scrambling when it comes to ETAs and restoration plans.
This is 2024, not 1994. Microsoft’s megalodon size and resource wealth is inexcusable for such shoddy incident preparedness. There’s no conceivable scenario where they shouldn’t have automatic failsafes and alternative routing measures already baked into their global backbone.
While the transparency around root causes and timelines has been lacking, I’m just relieved they seem to be making meaningful progress on redundancy measures. For companies like mine operating in affected regions, having workloads and data stranded has been enormously disruptive and costly.
Some good news from Microsoft about rerouting traffic to restore service for Azure and other cloud platforms in South Africa. But assuming this redirection plan to unimpacted Azure regions failed, it could have been much worse. Maybe this will be the wake-up call Microsoft needs to seriously harden their global network resilience.
It appears that Microsoft is taking a familiar approach by redirecting traffic flows and replicating affected workloads to other Azure resource pools, aligning with typical disaster recovery strategies. Despite encountering some challenges in implementation, this response mirrors standard DR practices. In the event of a major internet backbone disruption, any hyperscale cloud provider would likely have to activate comparable failover protocols to maintain service continuity.
In that bygone era, maybe it was forgivable to have extended outages from infrastructure failures. But in today’s world? Where availability is THE prime directive? Inexcusable for a company of Microsoft’s stature and ambition.
While Microsoft comically scrambles behind the scenes, smarter cloud hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Oracle are already reconfiguring around this debacle with far more resilient architectures and transparent incident comms. It’s 2024’s iPhone vs Microsoft Bob moment.
Wow. Do you seriously call this a “Microsoft Bob moment”? When last did someone used that comparism
I’m not surprised by this excuse from Microsoft. They always seem to underestimate the severity of technical issues and fail to meet their own deadlines. This undersea cable outage is just another example of their lack of efficiency.
While it’s disappointing to hear about the delay in fixing the undersea cable outage, it’s important to remember that Microsoft is not directly responsible for its repair. These incidents require cooperation among multiple parties, including cable operators, repair vessels, and regulatory bodies. Let’s hope they can swiftly resolve the issue and implement measures to prevent future outages.
This is a stark reminder that our digital lives are at the mercy of complex networks undersea and above, any disruption is a disaster. Worst part is there is no mention of the cause of the cable damages.
I’ve been following this story closely and I must say, the delay in fixing the massive undersea cable outage is concerning, to say the least. This incident highlights the fragility of our digital infrastructure and the potential for cascading effects on businesses and consumers alike.
You’re absolutely right! This cable outage is a nightmare for global shipping. Container tracking is going haywire, and communication delays are causing real headaches. Hopefully, they get this fixed soon before it throws the whole supply chain into chaos
Ugh, this internet outage is the worst timing ever. Right in the middle of a ranked match… Seriously though, this is a huge disruption for gamers worldwide. Millions rely on this undersea cable for smooth online play.
What exactly are the mermaids doing down there that keeps breaking these cables? Maybe they need an “Underwater Cable Safety 101” course.
Looks like we’re going back to low-tech communication for a while…
On a serious note, I can’t help but wonder if Neptune is playing some pranks on us with these undersea cable issues. Maybe he’s trying to remind us that even the digital world can be disrupted by the forces of nature. Or perhaps he’s just trying to make a point about the importance of strong cable connectors.
Just Cather, you bring up a fascinating point. In Roman mythology, Neptune was the god of the sea and earthquakes. Here we are, facing disruptions caused by an undersea cable outage, and it’s hard not to think of a little divine intervention. Maybe Neptune’s just reminding us that the digital world, for all its advancements, is still built on a very physical foundation – the ocean floor in this case.
Alright, gotta admit, the thought of Neptune throwing a trident tantrum and messing with our undersea cables is pretty funny, Just_Cather. Maybe Bezos can offer him a Prime subscription to appease him.