A major service outage on Wednesday left millions of MTN Nigeria customers unable to make calls or connect to the internet. The outage, which lasted four hours, was caused by multiple fiber cuts, the company said in a statement.
The telecom operator noted that the challenge was noticed in the afternoon and affected mostly subscribers in Lagos.
“Our engineers are working hard to resolve with services gradually being restored in some areas,” Funso Aina, senior manager, External Relations, MTN Nigeria, told TechCabal.
“A fiber optic cable cut refers to a complete or partial severing of the thin glass fibers that make up a fiber optic cable,” says one publication. “These cables transmit data over long distances using light pulses.”
A major cause of fibre cuts in cities like Lagos is road construction and vandalism
Fibre cuts are a constant headache for operators in the telecom industry. The industry spent ₦14 billion to fix around 59,000 fibre cuts between 2022 and 2023, data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) show.
