Somalilandsun-The government of Somalia says a widespread internet outage that began roughly two weeks ago is costing the Horn of Africa nation about $10 million around 1 billion Somali shillings each day.
“This is a major disaster the post and telecommunications minister, Abdi Anshur Hassan, told a press conference in Mogadishu without giving reasons for the outage, but officials and internet providers have attributed the problem to a commercial ship that they said cut an undersea cable.
The now two weeks going outage which has sparked anger across Somalia and affected the central and southern parts of the country including the capital, Mogadishu has so far cost the country emerging out of conflict over $130m in losses.
The undersea fiber optic cable serving Somalia, via kenya that was put in place in 2013has sparked outrage in Mogadishu and across the country with many businesses counting losses.
According to VOA journalist Harun Maruf that many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country rely on the affected cable line resulting in internet and fixed voice service providers to go down.
“Among the worse affected are the media, businesses and government offices who rely on the internet for most activities thence faced with difficulties in managing their daily work due to the disruption.
Though Many Somalis rely on internet cafes rather than 3G or satellite internet, usage is low , with an estimated penetration rate of 1.6 per cent in 2014 according to the International Telecommunication Union.
