There are indications that the ongoing disruption to internet services in Nigeria and some other African countries may take weeks or months to fix.

FIJ understands that the disruption started on Thursday, with many Nigerians, especially MTN users, lamenting the situation.

While addressing the internet outage via a post on Thursday, MTN Nigeria said it was due to damaged international undersea cables across East & West Africa.

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“The repair process is ongoing to resolve the situation as soon as possible,” wrote MTN Nigeria on X.

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According to a Bloomberg report published on Friday, the connectivity issues experienced in eight West African countries as well as South Africa happened because four ocean cables off the west coast of Africa were cut the previous day.

The affected countries are Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon.

Bloomberg quoted a spokesperson from Cloudflare, an internet analytics firm, regarding the timeframe for repairing the cables: “Repairs can take weeks to months, depending on where the damage is, what needs to be repaired, and local weather conditions.

“The assignment of repair ships depends on a number of factors, including ownership of the impacted cables.”