A fault on a cable has caused a blackout of internet services in West Africa. The damage was found to be on a cable 15miles of the coast of Benin on a SAT 3 cable that connects Europe to South Africa. The impact left 70% of Nigeria’s bandwidth out of action causing chaos in the banking sector, government and mobile phone networks. The fault also had a knock on impact in Togo, Niger and Benin and as a short term remedy countries had to reroute the traffic or use satellite links to maintain connectivity. The network is run by Suburban Telecom and a ship was diverted from Cape Town to repair the fault.