Hospitals, banks in Tanzania affected by internet outage
What you need to know:
- Financial services have been affected, leading to sluggishness in banking operations due to nationwide internet disruptions. Standard Chartered Bank has sent a message to their clients informing them of the challenge.
Dar es Salaam. The internet outage in Tanzania has had significant repercussions on various sectors, including healthcare, banking, and media.
In some hospitals, service delivery has been hampered, with patients experiencing delays in receiving critical medical results.
Aga Khan Hospital in Dar es Salaam says they continue to offer services to patients by using an internal network. However, for those who require external communication to receive services, such as health insurance cardholders, the situation has been challenging, specifically for NHIF cardholders.
Speaking to The Citizen, Aga Khan Hospital IT manager, May Kibaja, said that their internal service delivery has not been disrupted.
"The only challenge we face is communication via email and so on. We also face the challenge of catering to NHIF patients since we need to communicate with the insurance provider before services can be rendered," she said.
She added that, unfortunately, NHIF has not provided any way forward for mitigating the situation.
Similarly, financial services have been affected, leading to sluggishness in banking operations due to nationwide internet disruptions. Standard Chartered Bank has sent a message to their clients informing them of the challenge.
Access to international money transfer services through banks and other financial institutions has also been severely affected. Many service providers have failed to operate using services such as Money Gram, Western Union, and RIA, among others.
The media industry is also grappling with the consequences of the outage, as there are delays in publishing news and other essential information. Operations such as content production have been particularly impacted.
This outage stems from a submarine cable cut that occurred on Sunday, affecting multiple internet service providers across East and South Africa.
The disruption has severely impacted sub-sea capacity between these regions. While details about the fibre cut remain unclear, faults have been detected in key submarine cables, including the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and the Seacom cables.
Additionally, three critical submarine cables in the Red Sea—SSeacom, EIG, and AAE1—have also suffered cuts and remain unrepaired, exacerbating the widespread outage.
