Telecom consumers in Nigeria will now receive advance warnings and updates on major service disruptions, following a new directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
According to the NCC, all telecom operators must notify affected users through media platforms, disclosing the cause of the outage, affected areas, and estimated restoration timelines. Where disruptions last beyond 24 hours, operators are required to offer proportional compensation, such as service validity extensions, in line with the Consumer Code of Practice Regulations.
Nnenna Ukoha, Acting Head of Public Affairs at the NCC, made this known in a statement, while the Commission’s Director of Technical Standards and Network Integrity, Edoyemi Ogor, emphasized that the directive follows months of piloting a new reporting system with telecom providers.
“This move is part of our broader effort to ensure transparency, accountability, and improved service quality across the telecom sector,” Ogor said. He added that operators must also provide at least one week’s notice for planned outages.
The directive supports the implementation of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Executive Order, which designates telecom infrastructure as Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII), underscoring its role in national security and economic stability.
The NCC defines major outages based on three criteria:
- Network issues (e.g., fibre cuts, theft, vandalism) affecting 5% of subscribers or five or more Local Government Areas (LGAs);
- Isolation of 100+ sites or 5% of total sites for over 30 minutes;
- Severe network degradation in any of the top 10 traffic-heavy states.
Operators are also required to report such disruptions via the NCC’s publicly accessible Major Outage Reporting Portal, which provides transparency on the causes and scale of each incident.
