Here's some very bad news for the people living in the affected region, which at the same time will be a godsend for a lot of people sick of Nigerian scammers and spammers.

Due to damage to the SAT-3 cable which connects Portugal and Spain to South Africa, via West Africa, the entire region is facing severe communications problems. Some 70 percent of Nigerian bandwidth is gone, Togo and Niger are completely offline, but Benin has managed to reroute its net traffic through neighboring countries. Much of Nigeria's traffic is routed through Benin, but it can't find alternatives like it's small neighbor, as there's simply not enough bandwidth to go around.

The 15,000km SAT-3 cable is the only fiber optic cable serving West Africa, and there are no practical alternatives, and there's a good chance the problem will persist for quite a while. It's still unclear what caused the disaster, but Telkom South Africa, one of the shareholders of SAT-3, says it's investigating a cable fault on the Benin branch. Ladi Okuneye, chief marketing officer of Suburban Telecoms, Nigeria, says the SAT-3 consortium is sending a ship to the scene.

Unfortunately, it will take the ship two weeks to reach the area, after it deals with a lot of local red tape.

More here.