Days after a cut on undersea broadband network SEACOM disrupted internet services for some Africans, a breakage on one of its partner cables has occurred this morning.

In a statement on the SEACOM website, the wholesale network provider says that at 06:20 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) today “the SMW4 cable system suffered a cable cut off the coast of Egypt.”

The SMW4 cable, also referred to as the South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) system, is SEACOM’s partner network throughout the Mediterranean.

SMW4 is a subsea fibre optic network that connects Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.

It is not yet known as to how SMW4 was damaged.

However, SEACOM - which stretches 17,000km and connects South Africa and Eastern Africa with Europe and Southern Asia - has suffered this latest disruption after the company says it had worked to restore services following a cut that affected it on 22 March.

Last Friday, a physical cable cut north of the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea disrupted services on the sub-sea broadband network.

Customers of internet service providers (ISPs) such as South Africa’s Mweb subsequently reported disruptions in their connections.

SEACOM’s chief executive officer Mark Simpson then said in a statement that it may take a “week or two” to repair the damage.

But in the meantime, SEACOM went about rerouting traffic. By yesterday, SEACOM in a statement said that it had restored its services by establishing “multiple paths across the Mediterranean on cable systems that were unaffected by the recent cable cuts.”

Regaring the latest SMW4 cut, SEACOM says it has restored all services that use the SMW4 cable.