By SCM Staff I Wednesday, Dec.17.25
LAGOS, Nigeria — For millions of residents across Nigeria’s southeastern and north-central heartlands, the digital world went dark this week.
In a series of reports released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country’s primary telecommunications regulator, officials detailed a catastrophic failure of connectivity affecting two of the nation’s largest providers, MTN and 9mobile.
The outages, which began over the weekend, have severed access to voice calls, SMS, and data services, effectively isolating dozens of local government areas from the modern economy.
On Wednesday morning, MTN reported a major fiber optic cable cut that effectively paralyzed its network across three major states: Abia, Ebonyi, and Enugu.
The disruption spans a wide geographic arc, from the bustling commercial centers of Abakaliki and Afikpo to the rural stretches of Ohafia and Bende.
The timing could not be worse. In these regions, where mobile banking and USSD codes are the primary way citizens pay for everything from groceries to medical bills, the outage has brought daily life to a standstill.
”When the fiber is cut, the digital heartbeat of the community stops,” said a local analyst tracking the disruption.
“This isn’t just about missing a social media post; it’s about a farmer who can’t receive payment for his crops or a mother who can’t call for help in an emergency.”
The MTN incident followed a separate, ongoing crisis in Benue State. Since Monday afternoon, 9mobile has been “under investigation” for a total service blackout across nine local government areas, including Oturkpo and Agatu.
These incidents are not isolated anomalies but symptoms of a deepening national crisis.
According to NCC data, Nigeria recorded more than 40,000 cases of telecom infrastructure disruption in the first eight months of 2025 alone.
Fiber cuts—often caused by uncoordinated road construction or deliberate vandalism—account for over 50 percent of all network outages in the country.
The Nigerian government has recently moved to designate telecommunications infrastructure as “Critical National Information Infrastructure” (CNII), a legal status intended to bring harsher penalties for vandals and better protection for cables.
However, the reality on the ground remains volatile.
The cost of this fragility is immense. Experts estimate that the telecom sector—a rare bright spot in Nigeria’s economy—loses billions of naira annually to repairs.
For MTN, the nation’s largest carrier, the cost of fixing these frequent cuts has ballooned to over 26 billion naira ($16 million) in a single year, diverting funds that were originally earmarked for expanding 5G and rural connectivity.
As technicians work to splice the severed lines in the Southeast, the NCC has launched a new “Major Outage Reporting Portal” to provide real-time updates to frustrated consumers.
Yet, for the residents of Benue and Ebonyi, a web portal offers little comfort when the signals on their phones remain stubbornly absent.
