MTN Gives Reason For Outage Customers Suffered Recently

‘Fibre Cuts affecting voice, data services,’ MTN explains outage

The network outage that affected MTN Nigeria's subscribers for the majority of Wednesday was due to “multiple fiber cuts,” according to the telecommunications company.

According to data released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), MTN had 87,038,768 subscribers as of December 2023. This represents 38.79% of the total market share, making it the largest licensed mobile network operator (MNO) in the nation.

The 87 million MNO customers had trouble making and receiving calls for hours on Wednesday, which fueled rumors that the NCC had carried out its threat to bar subscribers who aren't linked to their National Identity Numbers (NINs) by February 28, 2024.

Many subscribers were left stranded, and some of them went to the MTN office closest to them in order to receive an explanation.

MTN, however, blamed “multiple fiber cuts” for the issue in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

“You have been experiencing challenges connecting to the network due to a major service outage caused by multiple fibre cuts affecting voice and data services,” the post read.

“Our engineers are working hard to resolve with services gradually being restored in some areas.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and ask for your patience and understanding as the team works to restore full service as soon as possible.”

Telecommunications service providers were instructed by the NCC on Wednesday to block users who haven't linked their phone numbers to their NIN by February 28, 2024, at the latest.

Telecom customers must link their NIN to their SIM cards as a matter of critical national security, according to a directive given by the Executive Vice Chairman of the Commission, Aminu Maida, through the Director of Public Affairs, Ruben Mouka, at the 45th Kaduna International Trade Fair on Wednesday.