Nairaland founder reacts to website shut down over “abuse report”

Nairaland, a prominent news community forum in Nigeria since its inception in 2008, recently experienced an unexpected disruption.

This hiatus was triggered by an overlooked abuse report, an issue that had gone unnoticed until it precipitated a significant setback.

Findings by Nairametrics revealed that the website has been down for approximately 12 hours showing a “Web server is down” error message.

Nairaland Founder, Seun Osewa, disclosed via a social media platform (X) that the site’s hosting service suspended operations following the discovery of this unaddressed abuse report, dating back to earlier in the month.

Osewa took to Twitter to share the sequence of events and the challenges faced in efforts to reinstate the website. Through a series of tweets, he provided insights into the complexities involved in resolving the issue and the steps being taken to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

What Seun Osewa 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.
See the link to his tweets.

Osewa explained that the technical support team communicated a waiting period of up to 48 hours for the abuse team’s review before the server could be reinstated. Expressing humility, Osewa underscored the limitations in expediting the process.

“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.”
His tweets

It is currently unclear which of the posts on the platform may have warranted the shutdown. Nairametrics findings (using website archive platform Wayback Machine) also indicate the last time the site was online was late 18th of December

But as Nairaland experiences this temporary disruption, the incident highlights the ongoing challenges platforms face in managing content responsibly while upholding freedom of expression.