An internet outage that hit Kenya on Tuesday at the height of anti-finance bill protests across the country may have been “sabotage”, a senior government official has claimed, adding to the mystery around the incident.
Radio and Communications PS Edward Kisianjani said saboteurs may have exploited the demonstrations to discredit the government.
“The disruption could have been caused by several things, but we still need to determine the exact cause and narrow it down. There may be technical hurdles, but it is also possible that there are individuals carrying out acts of sabotage to discredit the government, which is very easy to do.”
“But I would like to assure the country that we have absolutely no intention of shutting down media operations or internet connectivity.”
The two leading telecommunications companies, Safaricom and Airtel, had previously notified their customers of the disruption of submarine cables that provide Internet traffic inside and outside the country, and promised to restore services in the shortest possible time.
Peter Ndegwa, CEO of Safaricom, said the network outage on Tuesday was due to a failure in two of the telco’s submarine cables that carry internet in and out of the country.
“I sincerely apologize for the network outage that began on June 25. This outage was caused by reduced bandwidth on some cables carrying internet traffic. This affected not only Safaricom, but the entire industry. We are making an effort,” he said in a video message. We will do our best to ensure you get the services you deserve.”
At around 4pm on Tuesday, Kenyans took to social media to lament slow internet speeds, while social media platform X (formerly Twitter) remained inaccessible as the day turned to evening.
However, at 9pm, when President William Ruto took to the podium to address the country regarding the day’s events, many users reported an improved, almost normal calling experience, before speeds slowed down again immediately after the press conference.
The Kenya Communications Authority has dispelled concerns about a possible outage, stating that such action would sabotage Kenya’s fast-growing digital economy where internet connectivity supports massive livelihoods across the country.
However, multiple knowledgeable sources from the technology sector, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, claimed that there had been interference in the circuits located at the undersea cable landing stations in Mombasa.
Data released by global internet governance and cybersecurity tracker NetBlocks revealed that connectivity strength in Kenya dropped sharply from 100 percent to about 42 percent on Tuesday evening.
Meanwhile, Proton AG, a Swiss technology company that provides privacy-focused online services, reported a 12-fold rise in VPN (virtual private network) downloads in Kenya due to internet restrictions.
On Wednesday, NetBlocks conducted an impact assessment of the disruption where its findings indicated that no actual damage to the undersea cables had been identified and that the impact on Kenya was higher than in previous cable outages.
Internet shutdowns of this kind have proven costly to economies, with every hour of outage causing losses amounting to millions of shillings in the country’s GDP.
In Kenya, for every hour the internet is down, the country loses about Sh1.8 billion of its GDP, according to NetBlock’s internet outage cost calculator.
On the other hand, an hour of X disruption causes a loss of about Sh462 million.
Since Kenya is the main route for submarine cables to neighboring Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the outage has also reportedly affected the countries. However, the full extent of the effects outside Kenya has not been documented.
