Popular forum, Nairaland, down over neglect of ‘abuse report’

Nigeria’s popular website and the most visited forum has been down for hours since yesterday (Sunday).

A check by NewsWireNGR at the time of publication revealed the platform is still down and expected to be so for some more hours.

Updating netizens on the development, Nairaland founder, Seun Osewa, revealed via a post on X (formerly Twitter) that the problem is “a human issue, not a technical issue”.

Explaining, Seun said; “Nairaland’s server was taken down because I overlooked an abuse report that was originally sent on the 14th. After the takedown, I removed the offensive content.

“The UI for bringing back the server didn’t work so it took hours to get support on how to get that done. Minutes after the forum was brought back, they took the server down again with no warning.

“I’m guessing that the content I removed was still cached on Cloudflare servers, so they could still see it. I have cleared the caches now, but they are not communicating. I hope they will communicate tomorrow.

“If you have any ideas for working with abuse teams, please share. My track record is abysmal.

“The technical support team has informed me that only the abuse team has the power to reinstate our server, that their review could take up to 48 hours, and that nothing can be done to speed up the process. I’ve been informed that the only thing I can do is wait. It’s humbling.”

Clarifying who took the site down, Seun responding to an X user’s question, said, “Our host took the server down as punishment for not responding to the abuse report on time.

“All we need is for a kind human to review the case and reverse the block.

“It is really a small issue that should have been resolved in less than 2 minutes.”

Meanwhile, netizens have reacted to the development, with many disappointed that a platform with such traffic does not have autonomy on its own server.