Business owners across Nigeria who rely on the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) for company registration and updates have expressed growing frustration following the prolonged inaccessibility of the agency’s website, which has reportedly been down for at least three days.
Checks by Nairametrics revealed that users attempting to access the platform were repeatedly met with a “502 Bad Gateway” error a technical issue that usually indicates a communication failure between servers. The disruption has raised concerns among entrepreneurs and corporate stakeholders who depend on the portal for timely business-related services.
The outage comes only weeks after the Commission announced a temporary shutdown of its online portal between April 17 and April 20, 2026, for scheduled maintenance aimed at improving service delivery and enhancing user experience.
According to the CAC, the maintenance exercise was designed to strengthen the efficiency and reliability of its digital platform. In its earlier statement, the Commission noted:
“To serve you better, we will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on our portal from 12:00 midnight on April 17, 2026, to 6:00 a.m. on Monday, April 20, 2026. During this period, the portal may be temporarily unavailable. We regret any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience and understanding.”
The recent downtime has also drawn attention because it follows reports alleging that nearly 25 million documents may have been compromised through unauthorized access to parts of the Commission’s infrastructure. The CAC later confirmed that it experienced a cybersecurity incident affecting sections of its systems, raising fresh concerns about the protection of sensitive corporate information and personal data.
In response to the incident, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission launched a formal investigation into the reported breach. The Commission stated that the probe would assess critical areas including access control systems, vulnerability testing, data privacy impact assessments, and third-party data handling practices, with the aim of reinforcing the security of personal and corporate data across government platforms.
The Chief Executive Officer of the NDPC, Vincent Olatunji, also directed the agency’s technical teams to collaborate with relevant authorities and organisations to strengthen existing data protection frameworks and cybersecurity safeguards.
Similarly, the National Information Technology Development Agency disclosed that it had activated coordinated cybersecurity measures alongside the CAC. The agency further instructed government institutions to review their security architecture, address system vulnerabilities, and improve monitoring and incident response mechanisms.
The development is particularly significant given the CAC’s recent push toward digital transformation. In July 2025, the Commission introduced an AI-powered registration portal capable of processing business registrations and issuing certificates within 30 minutes after National Identification Number (NIN) verification. The initiative marked a major transition from manual, office-based processes to a more efficient and fully digital system.
As part of broader regulatory reforms, the Commission also removed 247 companies from its database over the use of falsified Registered Certificate (RC) numbers. By February 2026, the CAC disclosed that its AI-enabled systems were processing as many as 10,000 business registration requests daily.
According to the Registrar-General, Hussaini Magaji, the Commission’s digital support infrastructure also handles an average of 5,000 customer inquiries daily through its email and call Centre channels, reflecting the growing dependence of Nigerian businesses on the agency’s online services.
credit: Nairametrics
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