Resilience of Nigeria's Internet Infrastructure: An Analysis of the March 2024 West Africa Subsea Cable Cut

This study examined Internet resilience in West Africa by analyzing the March 13–14, 2024, multi-cable submarine outage to determine how physical topology, commercial arrangements, and governance shaped propagation, impact and recovery. It aimed to generate a country-level dependency map, quantify control-plane and data-plane responses, and identify prioritized, implementable mitigations. Methodologically, the research combined a PRISMA-guided systematic review with a high-frequency event analysis that triangulated proprietary monitoring telemetry, public BGP archives, regulator and operator notices, IXP throughput reports, and sectoral impact proxies to recreate minute-level resilience curves and estimate short-run exposure. Key findings showed that advertised aggregate capacity obscured critical route concentration and single-metro aggregation; that resale and leasing practices produced effective single-vendor dependencies; and that abrupt BGP withdrawals and path inflation rapidly converted physical breaks into application outages. Recovery timelines were driven less by splice complexity than by repair vessel availability, sequencing, and cross-jurisdictional coordination. The study concluded that durable resilience depended on aligning physical topology, market incentives, and institutional preparedness rather than adding headline capacity alone.