ABIDJAN - Major internet access cuts struck several African countries Thursday because of damage to submarine communications cables, telecom operators said.

"Breaks in multiple major undersea cables have affected connectivity services in several West African countries," the South African operator MTN Group said in a post on X.

It said it was trying to reroute internet traffic through "alternative network paths" and working with partners to repair the cables, without providing details on the damage.

Ivory Coast was suffering the biggest impact of the cuts, followed by Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso.

Less severe outages were occurring in Cameroon, Gabon, Namibia and Niger, and to a lesser extent in Nigeria and South Africa, according to the global internet surveillance group NetBlocks.

In South Africa, the operator Vodacom wrote on X that the "connectivity issues" were due to multiple undersea cable failures, without providing details.

Most of the world's internet traffic passes through the scores of fibre optic cables laid along seafloors, with one of the longest, at 15,000 kilometres (9,300 miles), stretching from Portugal to South Africa.