Customers of MTN Nigeria were left stranded for some hours on Tuesday because they could not access communication services.

According to observations, the communication blackout started in the afternoon and persisted for hours. Many MTN subscribers took to social media to lament this network downtime.

Many complained about how their inability to call, text, or access the Internet might affect their ability to communicate with their lovers, especially since the day was Valentine’s Day.

Also, for some the network downtime affected their ability to make funds transfer and pay for goods and services. Since a Central Bank of Nigeria policy pushed many transactions online, Nigerians have had to increasingly rely on Mobile Network Providers to make money transfers.

On Facebook, Winston Rex, said, “Fix your network, I can’t do my job and you are here posting about love when you are having nationwide problems?”

Alberta Hman, stated, “Me that is chatting with my val before the network went off, MTN bring back my Val. His number is not connecting.”

Salisu Eleniyan, further said, “MTN, you almost mad me to wash plate at gusto food.

Israel Musa, added, “My girlfriend is using MTN, now she’s offline on valentine day, MTN why you do me so?”

On Twitter, @m_settler tweeted, “Was conducting online interviews and @MTNNG pulled a Thanos on all networks. Phone, WiFi. All went to zero.”

@ToyosiGodwin said, “Did my data just finish, or MTN actually went off service? Any MTN user with data here?”

@Modupelolly said, “MTN network has disappeared for the past 40 minutes. What is happening?”

@mss_tobi said, “LMFAOO it is MTN that’ll scatter a lot of relationships today

Many of the subscribers who spoke our correspondent expressed frustration over their inability to make calls or access the Internet. Many stated that this had affected their work

According to a source at MTN, the outage could have been caused by a fibre cut. The source confirmed that Lagos and Abuja had been confirmed to have network down time

The source said, “Yes, the network was down for over one hour. We are still trying to understand exactly what happened. But preliminary reports suggest a fibre cut. We don’t know the extent yet, but I can confirm Lagos and Abuja.

“We are monitoring and trying to resolve this as quickly as possible. It’s sad on a day like this.”

The source added, “For things like this, when you have issues like this, the primary concern is to fix things before knowing what has happened.

“The primary focus now is to restore the network and ensure that the customers have the best experience. It is an important day for many people. We are trying to restore the network fully, to optimal capacity. We would investigate after we have restored capacity.”

On October 9, 2021, MTN had a national downtime that lasted for about two hours. Many subscribers of the network provider could not access calls, SMS, and Internet services.

On October 17, 2021, the firm apologised that the network downtime was caused by a system error.

In a video message, MTN Nigeria Chief Executive Officer, Karl Toriola, said, Last Saturday, we had an outage that left our customers without a connection for several hours

On behalf of the entire MTN team, I want to start with a heartfelt apology. We are truly sorry for the disruption this caused for so many in our MTN family.”

He added, “Our technical teams have traced the cause of the problem to an error that shifted all our 4G customers onto the 3G band. This overloaded the 3G band, causing a domino effect that impacted the whole network. Our engineers were able to resolve the problem.