Fibre Cuts: The Invisible Threat to Nigeria’s Digital Growth

Nigeria’s rapid digital growth is being hindered by a silent crisis: fibre-optic cable cuts. These disruptions are not just slowing internet speeds, but also crippling businesses, healthcare, education, and financial services. Mary Nnah reports on the impact of this growing problem and the efforts to address it.

On a Tuesday morning in Ibadan, Mrs. Funke Adeyemi waited anxiously beside her laptop in a tiny classroom at a bustling tutorial centre. Students were due to sit an online entrance exam critical to their university admission. When the clock struck exam time, screens blinked empty; the internet had vanished.

Outside, a construction crew was digging up a busy road and, unbeknownst to them, severed an underground fibre-optic cable. Later that day, banks in the city reported failed USSD transactions, restaurants struggled with card payments, and healthcare workers could not access digital patient records.

This wasn’t an isolated glitch. It was another fibre cut, one of tens of thousands that occur every year across Nigeria — and their impact extends far beyond “slow internet.” Telecommunications infrastructure is the backbone of the modern economy. when it snaps, everything that relies on it screeches to a halt.

A Surge of Disruption

Fibre-optic cables transmit the vast majority of domestic and international internet traffic in Nigeria, enabling everything from emails to electronic payments to telehealth. But according to data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), between January and August 2025, Nigeria recorded 19,384 fibre-optic cable cuts, which translated to an average of over 2,400 incidents per month. In some months, cuts exceeded 1,100 per week.

Fibre breaks stem from many causes, including road works without proper cable mapping, excavation by utilities, errant construction crews, and sometimes outright vandalism or theft. While incidents are most frequent in urban growth areas, they occur in every state. The regulator’s incident reports show that fibre breaks have steadily increased despite repeated industry warnings.

As the industry has grown, broadband and data services have become essential to everyday life in Nigeria, a country with over 150 million internet users and one of Africa’s largest telecom markets.

Beyond Connectivity Economic Costs

Cable breaks do not only slow down the browsing experience; they also interrupt commercial activities and lifestyle services. In 2023 alone, telecom operators reported that repairs and redundancies to address fibre damage cost about N14 billion, with total economic losses, including lost revenue from these outages, estimated at around N27 billion.

Gbenga Adebayo, Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), says the impact ripples across all sectors. “Daily fibre cuts, often caused by federal and state road construction contractors, are creating enormous economic losses, nationwide service disruptions, destruction of critical digital infrastructure, loss of assets without compensation, and interruptions to banking, education and security,” he told industry stakeholders in Abuja.

For small businesses such as e-commerce shops or fintech startups, even a brief outage can mean lost transactions that never return. For healthcare providers, it can delay access to patient histories or diagnostics. For students, it can mean missing critical online learning or exams. For larger enterprises, prolonged downtime affects enterprise resource planning systems, supply-chain coordination, and investor confidence.

Operators Respond, Under Pressure

Telecommunications companies have reported increased investment in redundancy, route diversity and monitoring systems. However, the scale of the problem requires broader institutional collaboration between federal ministries, state governments, public-works contractors and the regulator.

Speaking recently about Airtel’s expansion plans, Airtel Nigeria CEO Dinesh Balsingh stressed both the challenge and the company’s commitment.

“We are rolling out massive fibre across the country this year, spanning fibre connecting states, densifying fibre in metro cities, connecting fibre to homes. And we are doing this despite the incessant fibre cuts experienced by telecoms operators. When there is a fibre cut, consumers are affected and to address the issue of fibre cuts, Airtel has devised a means of having multiple paths in our fibre rollout so that consumers are not affected when one path is damaged,” he said.

From an engineering perspective, redundancy is key, but it is also expensive. In a price-sensitive market, operators balance network reliability with affordability, while still contending with physical threats to infrastructure.

MTN Nigeria CEO Karl Toriola has also warned repeatedly about the scale of the challenge, telling industry observers earlier this year that “the level of fibre cuts, site vandalisation, and power theft undermines network quality nationwide. Every time infrastructure is damaged, millions of customers feel the impact instantly.”

His remarks reflect a broader industry concern: no operator can maintain world-class connectivity if critical assets remain exposed to uncontrolled construction and vandalism.

From Lagos to the World: Global Comparisons

Nigeria’s challenge is not unique. In the United States, deliberate cutting of fibre infrastructure can cause widespread service outages affecting tens of thousands of customers, emergency services and commercial operations, and operators have even offered rewards for information leading to arrests of vandals.

On the African continent, undersea cable faults have periodically caused regional outages, slowing financial services and internet access across West African nations simultaneously.

These global examples underscore a central truth: modern economies are only as resilient as their digital infrastructure.

Regulatory Response and Public Education

Recognising this, the federal government of Nigeria has placed telecommunications infrastructure under the Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII) Order of 2024, granting stronger legal protection and penal powers for damage to these assets. The Commission, alongside the four major telcos, has also embarked on public awareness and outreach initiatives designed to educate communities, contractors and municipal bodies on the shared responsibility of safeguarding telecom assets.

Dr. Aminu Maida, Executive Vice-Chairman of the NCC, has repeatedly highlighted the surge in fibre incidents and the broader costs. Industry roundtables have called for better coordination of pre-construction mapping, mandatory notification to network operators before digging, and penalties for negligence.

“Telecommunications infrastructure is critical to commerce, social life, education, health, and entertainment,” said Dr. Idris Olorunnimbe at a high-level industry engagement earlier this year. “When it is damaged, there must be consequences for those responsible.”

He reemphasised this point during his tour of telco facilities in Lagos, in company of the ALTON chairman and the NCC EVC.

Human Stories, National Stakes

In Port Harcourt, a large shop owner recounted how a midday outage stalled multiple POS terminals for hours, forcing customers to walk away from uncompleted purchases. An NGO coordinator in Kano described widespread disruptions during critical humanitarian interventions, not just electric power loss but simultaneous network outages due to fibre cuts.

For Adeyemi’s tutorial centre in Ibadan, the loss of service meant frustrated parents and students left to sweat under extended exam times — a pain not easily quantified but deeply felt by families striving for opportunity.

The Road Ahead

Experts agree that reducing fibre break incidents will require collaboration across government ministries, local authorities, contractors and operators, as well as investment in mapping, redundancy and enforcement mechanisms. The universal adoption of strict right-of-way protocols and contractor accountability could significantly reduce disruptions.

For a nation accelerating towards a digital future, where mobile banking, online education, telemedicine and digital entrepreneurship are everyday realities, the reliability of fibre infrastructure is more than a technical issue. It is a matter of national productivity, equity and global competitiveness.

As one telecom executive recently told industry peers, “Every time a fibre cable is cut, Nigeria’s ambition for a thriving digital economy is set back. We must do more than repair cables; we must protect the promise they carry.”