KEY POINTS
- MTN network disruptions reached 9,218 fibre cuts in 2025.
- Vandalism and outages drove over 1.6 million complaints.
- MTN network disruptions persist despite regulatory reforms.
MTN Nigeria said its network suffered 9,218 fibre cuts in 2025, underscoring persistent fragilities in the country’s telecom infrastructure even as subscriber numbers continue to climb.
In a LinkedIn post titled MTN Nigeria 2025 Wrapped, Chief Executive Officer Karl Olutokun Toriola said theft and vandalism affected 211 sites by the end of November, disrupting services relied upon daily by millions of users. The company counted more than 85 million subscribers by the end of September.
“With growth comes greater responsibility,” Toriola said. “The fibre cuts, theft, and vandalism directly disrupted services, and we take responsibility for these realities.”
MTN network disruptions expose infrastructure gaps
MTN also logged 1,624,263 customer complaints across calls, emails, social media and walk-in centres during the year. Toriola said each complaint served as a signal to assess where service delivery met expectations and where it fell short.
Industry data supports MTN’s assessment. The Nigerian Communications Commission’s Uptime portal recorded 118 network outage incidents in December 2025, with MTN accounting for 64 of them. Regulators attributed the disruptions to fibre cuts, power failures, bushfires and vandalism of telecom assets.
Operators say the scale of incidents reflects structural weaknesses rather than isolated failures. Fibre routes often run alongside roads without adequate protection, while base stations remain exposed to theft and accidental damage during construction.
The disruptions persist despite reforms
The challenges continue despite recent policy moves. In August 2024, President Bola Tinubu designated telecom assets as critical national information infrastructure, making deliberate damage a criminal offence. In May 2025, the NCC built up a public reporting platform for vandalism. Earlier that year, they also set up an interministerial group to deal with fiber cuts caused by roadwork.
Yet operators say enforcement remains weak. Arrests and prosecutions remain rare, even as incidents rose after May 2025. Theft for black-market resale, bush burning, accidental damage during construction and restricted access to sites all contribute to outages. The disruptions carry financial costs for operators and erode service quality for subscribers, who depend on mobile networks for payments, commerce and daily communication.
While acknowledging the gap between ambition and reality, MTN said it remains focused on improvement. “We are not where we want to be yet,” Toriola said. “But our commitment to putting the customer at the centre of everything we do remains constant.” As MTN approaches its 25th anniversary in 2026, the operator says strengthening network resilience remains a priority amid rising demand and mounting infrastructure risks.
