A top government official has alleged that an Internet outage that hit Kenya on Tuesday at the height of the nationwide anti-Finance Bill protests may have been ‘sabotage’, extending mystery over the incident.
Broadcasting and Telecommunications PS Edward Kisiang’ani said wreckers may have taken advantage of the demonstrations to discredit the government.
“The disruption could have been brought about by several things but we’re still yet to establish and narrow down the exact cause. It could be technical hitches, but there could also be characters out there carrying out sabotage to discredit the government, which is very easy,” he said.
“But I’d like to assure the country that we do not have any intention whatsoever to either shut down media operations or Internet connectivity.”
Leading telcos Safaricom and Airtel had earlier notified their customers of an outage on undersea cables that deliver Internet traffic in and out of the country, promising to restore services within the shortest time possible.
Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa said Tuesday’s network outage was due to a failure on two of the telco’s undersea cables that carry Internet in and out of the country.
“I sincerely apologise for the network outage that started on June 25. This outage was caused by reduced bandwidth on some cables that carry Internet traffic. This affected not only Safaricom but the entire industry. We are doing everything possible to ensure that you get the services you deserve” he said in a video message.
At around 4pm Tuesday, Kenyans took to social media to lament slowing Internet speeds, while social media platform X (formerly Twitter) remained inaccessible as the day transitioned into the evening.
However, at 9pm when President William Ruto took to the podium to address the country regarding the day’s happenings, several users reported experiencing improved connectivity that thinly bordered normal, before the speeds dawdled again immediately after the press briefing.
The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) had dispelled fears of possible disruption, noting that such an action would sabotage Kenya’s fast-growing digital economy as Internet connectivity supports massive livelihoods countrywide.
Multiple well-placed sources from the tech sector, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, however, claimed interference with circuits on the sub-sea cable landing stations in Mombasa.
Data from the global Internet governance and cybersecurity tracking organisation NetBlocks revealed that connectivity strength in Kenya dropped sharply from 100 percent to about 42 percent on Tuesday evening.
At the same time, Proton AG, a Swiss tech firm offering privacy-focused online services, reported a 12-fold spike in its (virtual private network) VPN downloads in Kenya due to the Internet restriction.
On Wednesday NetBlocks conducted an impact assessment of the disruption with its findings indicating that no physical sub-sea cable damage was identified and that the impact on Kenya was higher than in past cable cuts.
Internet shutdowns of such nature have proved costly to economies, with every hour of outage causing losses running into millions of shillings to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
In Kenya, for every hour of Internet shutdown, the country loses about Sh1.8 billion of its GDP, according to NetBlock’s cost of Internet shutdown calculator.
An hour of disruption of X, on the other hand, causes a loss of about Sh462 million.
As Kenya is a primary path to the sea cables for neighbouring Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and Eastern DR Congo, the outage was reported to have also affected the countries. However, the full extent of the impacts outside Kenya was not documented.
