Nigeria has lost over ₦273 billion in four days due to the disruption in internet services currently experienced by some internet service providers in the country, the NetBlocks Cost of Shutdown Tool has shown.
Africa Today News, New York reports that NetBlocks is a watchdog that monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the Internet. The service was launched in 2017 to monitor internet freedom while the NetBlocks Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST) estimates the economic impact of an internet disruption, mobile data outage or app restriction using indicators from the World Bank, International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and others.
On inputting the cost of the partial internet shutdown as a result of the cable cut in Nigeria from Thursday, March 14 to Sunday, March 17, 2024, the cost indicator showed that, the country lost over ₦273, 987,701,601 billion ($593,689,494 million) in four days using exchange rate as of May 2023.
This service estimates the economic impact of a single hypothetical internet disruption of the specified type, location and duration. It primarily models internet shutdowns and outages which impact entire populations typically lasting on the order of a few hours or days.
Read Also: Internet Disruptions Will Persist For 3 Weeks – MainOne
In the early hours of Thursday, March 14, 2024, Daily Sun reported that the banking sector and telecom industry and others were partially grounded due to internet disruption.
Customers of the banking and telecom industries were informed that they may not be able to carry out financial transactions due to network issues.
The internet outage was as a result of an external incident that resulted in a cut on MainOne and other companies’ submarine cable systems in the atlantic ocean, offshore Cote D’Ivoire, along the coast of West Africa.
MainOne, one of the undersea cable companies affected by the service disruptions, at the weekend, ruled out any quick fix to the quagmire as repairs may take up to three weeks.
MainOne said the rectification of the fault, retrieving necessary spares required for repair, “sailing to the fault location for the repair work might take one to two weeks, while about two to three weeks of transit time may be required for the vessel to pick up the spares and travel from Europe to West Africa once the vessel is mobilised.”
The chief operating officer (COO) eStream Networks and an Internet Service Provider Martins Akingba, in a telephone interview with Daily Sun, disclosed that the poor internet experience in Nigeria may persist for the next three weeks.
On how the internet disruption has affected his business, he said, “eStream quickly switched to another network, when we realised the outage. We are lucky that we have a contract with other submarine companies like Glo 1 which was not affected by the damage and has continued to operate normally”.
Speaking on losses the telcos might have incurred as a result of the disruption, the Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators of Nigeria, Gbenga Abebayo, told Daily Sun that what is important to the affected telecommunications companies at the moment is to restore services and minimize the impact on their customers.
He confirmed that major carriers had turned to alternative providers, rerouting traffic in an attempt to restore services.
Abebayo said while some providers had confirmed the restoration of services, others were still in the process of migration, leading to delays and congestion.
However, the chairman assured that in the next two to three days, services would be fully restored.
He assured users of communication services that the repairs were ongoing and that the horror would be over soon.
Of all the telcos, MTN Nigeria was the most affected by the network disruption, as it has the highest number of subscribers to its voice and data services.