Nigeria is grappling with a growing fibre crisis that has triggered thousands of network outages, slowing broadband growth, disrupting businesses, and raising concerns over the country's digital future.
Every morning in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, Godson Lucky, a mobile money agent, sets up his point-of-sale (POS) terminal hoping the network will stay on long enough for him to make a living.
However, when the signal drops, transactions fail, tempers flare, his income disappears, which is another quiet casualty of Nigeria's growing fibre crisis.
"Most times I lose a lot, even the customers get angry. Most of them get angry and walk away," said Godson.
For customers, the frustration can be just as painful, especially when money disappears into the system and does not arrive where it is meant to go.
"On several occasions I come to the POS to make a transaction and I find out that there is this network failure almost frequently these days, whereby I come to make an urgent transaction and you find out that the money you've transacted has not gotten to the point where you want it to go. And your money has been debited. And the POS agent will not give you the money and will tell you that there is a network failure and meanwhile you need that money urgently to solve one or two things," said John Ajodoh, a customer.
Repeated network failures ripple through Nigeria's cashless economy. Regulators say the scale of the disruption is far bigger than most users realize. Between January and August 2025, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) recorded more than 40,000 network disruptions including over 19,300 fibre cuts, 3,241 equipment thefts, and over 19,000 denied access cases.
The damage has also set back Nigeria's broadband ambitions. The country was expected to reach 70 percent penetration by the end of 2025, but by November it stood at just 50.58 percent, despite rising demand.
Experts say the crisis is being driven by poverty, poor planning and weak protection of telecom infrastructure.
"It is poverty that has pushed people to desperation and frustration. And so one of the outcomes will be vandalism. Then the second thing is that even the way we create or plant the infrastructure does not take into cognizance the reality or even environmental reality. Sometimes we also need to understand that even the geography of the country is also different. There are some water locked areas, there are some dry areas, there are areas of high population, there are areas of no population, there are also areas of construction," said Hauwa Mustapha, a digital economy expert. For telecom operators, the fallout is costly running into tens of billions of naira in repairs and lost revenue.
As Africa's largest economy pushes deeper into the digital age, analysts warn that without better protection for fibre networks, outages will continue to slow businesses, disrupt financial services and weaken Nigeria's digital future.
Nigeria's drive to build digital economy faces major setback due to fibre crisis
