MTN Nigeria apologises over Feb. 14 service breakdown 

By Chisom Nwatu

MTN Nigeria Communications Plc, has tendered an apology to its customers for the service breakdown on February  14, which prevented many customers of the company from making and receiving calls, even as data usage was also impossible for several hours.

MTN, apologizing to its customers, admitted that it failed the subscribers and disrupted their plans for the special day as a result of the network issue which prevented users from communicating with their loved ones. The company, however, said the issue with its network has been resolved and services restored.

“Today, of all days, you couldn’t count on us to keep you seamlessly connected with the people, places, businesses, and things that matter to you. Words cannot express how sorry we are sorry for the disruption we caused. The issue has been resolved and services restored. You matter to us and we will never stop showing you how much,” the company stated.

The telecoms giant in a message posted on its Twitter page on February 14, explained that it was facing a technical issue and promised to fix the problem soon.

“Dear customers due to an unexpected technical issue, some customers have difficulty using our services this time. Work is ongoing to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. We regret all inconveniences this may cause,” MTN tweeted.

However, many MTN subscribers had decried the service outage on the network as they were completely cut off from communicating while the service breakdown which started around Tuesday afternoon and lasted until the evening before it was resolved.

Data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) shows that as of December 2022, MTN had a total of 89 million active subscriptions on its network, making it the largest telecom operator in Nigeria.

Thus, with this large customer size, it was not surprising that the wide-scale service disruption affected many people across the country. And the fact that the disruption happened on an important day as Valentine’s Day was particularly damaging.

To this end, some MTN customers felt like the company needed to do more than just apologise, noting that the company needs to compensate the affected consumers.