Africa’s aviation sector extended its recovery in March 2026, with total airline capacity rising to 24.8 million seats, a 10.4 per cent increase from the same period last year.

This comes as stronger cross-border travel demand and expanding domestic networks lifted activity across the continent.

Fresh data from OAG’s monthly African aviation market update shows the growth was broad-based, with international routes continuing to dominate traffic while domestic travel also posted robust gains, underscoring sustained momentum in passenger demand and route expansion.

International capacity accounted for 77 per cent of total seats and rose 10.2 per cent year-on-year, while domestic capacity increased by 10.8 per cent, slightly outpacing international growth. The figures point to a market that is not only recovering but also deepening its regional connectivity.

“Total airline capacity across Africa this month is 24.8 million seats, up 10.4% compared with March 2025.

“International capacity represents 77% of total capacity and is up by 10.2% vs March 2025. Domestic capacity increased by 10.8%,” the report read.

The latest numbers are consistent with wider industry data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which reported that African carriers posted 17.9 per cent growth in passenger demand in January 2026, alongside a 16.3 per cent rise in capacity. Load factor improved to 77 per cent, indicating that the increase in available seats is being matched by stronger passenger uptake rather than excess supply.

The OAG data also highlights the airlines driving the expansion.

Ethiopian Airlines retained its lead as Africa’s largest carrier by seat capacity, offering 1,970,341 seats in March, up 4 per cent from a year earlier. The airline’s continued dominance marks its long-established position as the continent’s most expansive network carrier, with Addis Ababa serving as a major intercontinental hub.

The strongest gains, however, came from several regional and national carriers.

FlySafair posted 1,082,610 seats, a 13.4 per cent increase, while EgyptAir expanded capacity by 7.5 per cent to 848,102 seats.

Two of the sharpest jumps came from North and Southern Africa. Air Algérie grew capacity by 17.9 per cent, while Royal Air Maroc recorded a striking 26.6 per cent increase, suggesting an aggressive expansion of both regional and long-haul routes.

South African Airways, which has been rebuilding following years of restructuring, recorded a 25.5 per cent rise in seat capacity, a sign that its fleet restoration and route recovery plans are beginning to translate into measurable market presence.

By contrast, Kenya Airways was the only carrier among the leading operators to record a decline, slipping 1.3 per cent. That contraction comes as the airline grapples with operational pressures, including aircraft availability issues linked to Dreamliner groundings reported this month.

Beyond African carriers, the growing footprint of international operators such as Ryanair and Emirates points to deepening connectivity between African cities and global aviation hubs, particularly Europe and the Gulf.

That expansion is economically significant. Higher seat capacity typically signals stronger confidence from airlines in route profitability and demand sustainability. It also has spillover implications for tourism, trade, business travel, and cargo flows.

Cargo performance, in particular, has been one of Africa’s strongest aviation stories.

IATA data shows African airlines recorded an 18.2 per cent year-on-year increase in air cargo demand in January 2026, the fastest growth of any region globally, while cargo capacity rose 6.5 per cent. The Africa–Asia corridor has emerged as a particularly strong growth lane, benefiting from rising trade volumes and e-commerce shipments.

This suggests that the sector’s recovery is not being driven solely by passenger traffic but by a broader strengthening of aviation-linked commerce.

However, the growth story is made up of pressure points. A recent Reuters report highlighted rising jet fuel costs and supply constraints across several African markets, a factor that could squeeze margins even as traffic expands. For airlines already operating in cost-sensitive markets, sustained fuel inflation may test the durability of route expansion plans.

Still, the overall trajectory remains firmly positive. The combination of rising passenger demand, stronger cargo flows, restored route networks, and expanding fleet deployment suggests that Africa’s aviation sector is moving beyond a post-pandemic recovery narrative into a new phase of structural growth.

For investors, airport operators, and tourism-dependent economies, the March figures reinforce the view that aviation is once again becoming a critical engine of regional economic activity and continental integration.

China’s fast-rising artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek suffered its longest service disruption yet on Monday, a seven-hour outage that rippled across offices, developer communities, and social platforms.

This outage exposed the growing dependence of hundreds of millions of users on generative AI tools and sharpened focus on the company’s delayed next-generation model.

According to the company’s official status page, the outage lasted 7 hours and 13 minutes, stretching from the early hours of Monday until 10:33 a.m. local time, when the incident was finally marked resolved. The disruption is the most prolonged recorded failure of DeepSeek’s consumer-facing chatbot since the breakout success of its R1 and V3 models last year.

The outage was significant not simply because of its duration, but because it struck at a moment when DeepSeek has become embedded in everyday work routines across China and beyond. Users rely on the platform for drafting emails, preparing proposals, writing code, summarizing documents, and conducting research, making even a few hours of downtime operationally costly.

Chinese social media platforms were inundated with complaints as the service went dark. One widely shared post on Xiaohongshu captured the mood succinctly: “Only after DeepSeek went down did I realize I no longer knew how to work without it.”

That remark speaks to a broader reality in the AI economy: generative tools are no longer novelty products. They are increasingly becoming workplace infrastructure.

DeepSeek’s user base, estimated at more than 355 million as of February, means the outage likely affected a massive volume of consumer and enterprise workflows simultaneously. At that scale, a technical disruption becomes a business story, not merely a software incident.

The company has not disclosed the cause, adhering to its standard incident protocol. But the timeline suggests a more complex failure than a routine frontend glitch.

Reports indicate users first began experiencing problems late Sunday evening. An initial fix appeared to restore service temporarily, only for fresh performance issues to emerge hours later before the final resolution on Monday morning.

That multi-wave sequence points to deeper backend instability, potentially involving inference servers, load balancing, storage layers, or deployment rollback issues. In hyperscale AI systems, outages of this nature can stem from failed model-serving updates, GPU cluster overloads, memory bottlenecks, or cascading failures in distributed orchestration systems.

The timing has inevitably intensified speculation around DeepSeek V4, the long-anticipated successor to the models that propelled the Hangzhou-based startup into the global AI spotlight.

For weeks, the industry has been waiting for signs of a new flagship release. Yet DeepSeek has remained notably silent, even as rivals such as Zhipu AI, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI have launched increasingly sophisticated models and multimodal capabilities.

This matters strategically.

DeepSeek’s early advantage was built on performance, accessibility, and rapid adoption. But in China’s increasingly crowded AI race, market leadership now depends just as much on infrastructure reliability and product cadence as on benchmark scores.

A prolonged outage at a time of delayed product expectations risks feeding the perception that rivals are beginning to outpace it.

There is also a competitive capital-markets dimension to the story. Reliability is increasingly a proxy for enterprise readiness. Large clients choosing between foundational models for internal deployment will weigh uptime and stability as heavily as raw model intelligence.

In that sense, Monday’s disruption lands at a sensitive moment. The company’s rivals are making visible performance gains, while global attention remains fixed on whether DeepSeek can deliver a meaningful leap with V4. Any suggestion of infrastructure strain inevitably feeds market speculation that backend systems are being reconfigured for a major rollout, though no evidence currently supports that conclusion.

This is not the first major interruption the company has faced. Shortly after the release of R1 last year, DeepSeek disclosed that it had been hit by “large-scale malicious attacks”, widely understood to be distributed denial-of-service attacks aimed at overwhelming its servers during the height of its viral rise.

But Monday’s outage appears different in character. Unlike an external traffic flood, this incident appears to have affected the core web and app interface in a sustained manner, with multiple attempted fixes before full restoration. That pattern suggests either an internal deployment issue or infrastructure stress linked to scale.

For a platform whose value proposition increasingly rests on becoming indispensable to work and productivity, the incident brings to the fore that operational resilience has become central to the AI race.

The bigger story, then, is not merely that DeepSeek went down. It is that a seven-hour blackout has revealed how deeply AI systems are now woven into daily economic activity and how quickly reliability issues can translate into reputational and competitive pressure.