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.

There has been an ongoing 3 year battle between a British couple and Google in an attempt to get there price comparison website recognised. The website directs shoppers to online deals for goods such as TVs or flights but has struggled once it disappeared from Google search results under these categories. Many consumers believe that Google works on a formula which may have caused the site to disappear. For sites like these they rely on Google to forward traffic on – sometimes as much as 60% and if you get missed of then it has a massive impact on your business.

Wikipedia has finally hit a record more than three million articles after eight years and the work of many people around the world. The 3 million barrier was broken early on Monday morning UK time by an article about a Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen. The articles themselves have emerged through the contributions of more than 10 million registered users who have helped create more than 17 million pages and performed 326million edits on the English Wikipedia’s database. In comparison the French Wikipedia now has more than 800,000 articles while the Japanese, Polish and Italian sites have around 600,000. The site was first founded in 2001 by a team consisting of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and the popularity of the site heighten in 2004 – 2007.