The News
When users in Côte d’Ivoire of the popular ride-hailing and food-ordering app, Yango, started experiencing delays booking taxis and deliveries last month, the glitches were not to do with local bandwidth or power outages but the impact of problems elsewhere in the world.
Though temporary, the issue was a reminder of Africa’s vulnerability as a result of being reliant on internet infrastructure beyond the continent.
Yango licenses technology from Russian company Yandex, whose data centers in Russia were hit by Ukrainian drone strikes in October. While rumors spread among Ivorians that this was the cause of Yango’s issues, a spokesperson for the Dubai-based company told Semafor the disruptions were down to infrastructure changes in the Gulf.
Hadil Elmaki said it had to move operations to a different data center after a partner company said in September that the infrastructure affected by Iranian attacks could no longer support Yango’s work. “Moving interconnected systems between data centers is a complex process,” Elmaki said, while describing the disruptions as temporary “affecting certain functions of our services in Côte d’Ivoire. These were not widespread outages, but intermittent issues.”
Yango runs some of its operations using Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure, including servers in the UAE, according to public records reviewed by Semafor.
