Businesses came to a standstill in Juba Wednesday after an eight-hour internet blackout cutting across all networks gripped the capital.

The interruption has become ingrained in the tasks that South Sudanese perform each day, and internet interruption for more than seven hours negatively impacted the daily operations of companies that rely on the internet to ease their work.

The interruption that started in the early morning from 5:00 am to 2:00 pm on Wednesday afternoon has also affected media houses and social media, which also interrupted the flow of communication to the citizens.

The editors could not pull out the stories sent earlier by the reporters from their email and some banking institutions could not wire or transact money transfers, and this has affected some of the customers and banking officials for hours, especially in Juba.

A journalist who spoke to The City Review said the breakdown of the internet has greatly affected his newsroom because they rely on the internet to inform the world about what is happening in South Sudan.

“As a journalist, a single break on the internet is equivalent to one week because every minute you miss a lot,” he said.

On Wednesday, MTN South Sudan department of communication admitted that the interruption came following the fibre cut on the Uganda side by their engineers.

An officer working at the department of communication, Nana Alfred, said the technical team on the ground managed to fix the technical glitch and restore the internet services.

“Apologies for the inconvenience caused. We are committed to serving the people of South Sudan and ensuring that they get the benefit of modern connected life, “Nana said.

In September 2020, South Sudan recorded a remarkable increase in internet penetration percentage with 282,901 Facebook subscribers, leapfrogging Western Sahara and Chad in recent statistics published by the World Internet Stats.

South Sudan as a nation increased to 7.9 per cent, up from a low of 4 per cent in 2018, surpassing Chad and Western Sahara, which had 6.3 per cent and 4.7 per cent, respectively. The country sits behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and Madagascar with a difference of 1 per cent.

BuddeComm, an international independent research and consultancy company focusing on the telecommunications market and its role within the digital economy, says the development of the fixed-line broadband market in Africa has long been stymied by the lack of fixed-line infrastructure in rural and semi-rural regions.

The institution says for years, the poor quality of networks in urban areas like Juba, where internet users are concentrated, also hampered growth in penetration percentage in those cities, and as a result, mobile networks have provided the principal platform for voice and data connectivity.

Henry Lancaster, a digital researcher from BuddeComm, says between 90% and 98% of all internet connections in emerging countries like South Sudan are via mobile networks, and thus government regulators alike are concentrating on this platform to deliver on their broadband targets.