Nairaland's Server Shuts down, Founder says Overlooked Abuse Report is the Cause

Today makes it the 3rd day since the popular microblogging site, Nairaland became inaccessible. According to research, the platform is the sixth-most visited website in Nigeria and this only means that a lot of people stop by the website everyday. 

The founder of the forum, Seun Osewa, confirmed in a tweet posted on Monday, 18th December 2023 saying, "An unscheduled maintenance operation by our host has led to downtime on Nairaland. We are working on it with them but it may take a while to restore it."

Not long after, he returned to explain that Cloudflare took action to remove a post following a report of abuse that was submitted two weeks earlier. He went ahead to apologize to the public via his tweet stating that the issue is not a technical one but human and that they are reaching out to the people involved.  

Since the platform shut down, many users have raised an alarm, suggesting that the platform has probably been hacked but the founder annulled their assumptions, stating that Nairaland was shut down because they had neglected an abuse report sent earlier.

"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,” he said. 

Several users have testified to exploring the platform since they were able to have a phone with access to the internet. Nairaland has been up and active since 2005 and currently, it has over 400 million visitors and 3 million registered users who share content across various topics, promoting communities focused on news, politics, entertainment, and technology.

It's been days and Nairaland is still struggling to get the platform back to work. 

"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," Seun tweeted. 

The blog founder has, through his tweet, requested suggestions for collaborating with abuse teams, as their past experiences in this area have been unsatisfactory.

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