Service Disruption: restorative efforts could extend into April as trade, payment transactions suffer delays

As businesses and individuals continue to experience slow-paced or unavailable internet access – respite may take longer than anticipated as it is touted the restoration of services could extend into the end of April. Service providers would require a minimum of five weeks to pull the damaged cables out of the sea beds, and repair and fix them. The Internet outage, which resulted from multiple fiber cuts in four subsea cables, including MainOne, West African Cable System (WACS), African Coast to Europe (ACE), and South Atlantic Telecommunications 3 (SAT3), has been described as a major crisis. Local businesses and financial transactions have been constrained by the slow internet. At the weekend, millions of Nigerians who had financial transactions to execute could not do much as most bank apps were not accessible. For a few that were functional, transfer turnaround time has increased significantly with some banks placing caveats that completion time could not be guaranteed. Payment points at gas stations and supermarkets, at the weekend, were crowded by shoppers who were struggling to make payments.