A disruption to United Bank for Africa’s mobile banking application has left some customers unable to access their accounts or complete transactions, highlighting the growing dependence of Nigeria’s consumers and businesses on digital financial services.
UBA, one of Nigeria’s largest banks, apologised to customers after a prolonged disruption to its mobile banking application prevented some users from accessing the platform. Customers reported difficulties logging in and carrying out transactions, prompting complaints on social media.
The bank said it was working to restore normal service and advised customers to use alternative channels while the problem was being resolved, according to local reports.
The incident comes as Nigeria’s payments system has become increasingly digital. The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, or NIBSS, said electronic payment transactions reached $806.6 billion in the period covered by its latest figures, based on an exchange rate of about ₦1,326.52 to the dollar.
Transactions on the NIBSS Instant Payments platform reached 11.2 billion, up 120% from 2022, according to NIBSS.
That growth means interruptions to banking applications can have consequences beyond inconvenience. Mobile banking apps are increasingly used for transfers, bill payments, airtime purchases and other everyday transactions that once required cash, an ATM or a physical bank branch.
Nigeria’s central bank has been tightening rules around the resilience and security of digital payments as adoption accelerates.
Mobile money transactions rose 81% to $280.5 billion in 2025, while transaction volumes increased almost 66% to 28.74 billion, according to central bank data.
The scale of Nigeria’s electronic payments market underscores the potential impact of outages. Electronic transactions reached $214.8 billion in the first quarter of 2025, according to NIBSS.
The central bank has also introduced measures aimed at reducing payment failures and improving the resilience of the country’s financial infrastructure.
NIBSS has begun rolling out the National Payment Stack, a new payment infrastructure intended to modernise and eventually replace its existing instant-payment system. By August, the new platform had recorded 26.55 million transactions worth about $1.06 billion across 48 participating institutions.
UBA’s scale adds another dimension to the disruption. The bank said in its 2025 annual report that it served more than 45 million customers across 24 countries.
For customers, the shift towards digital banking creates a new vulnerability. When a banking application fails, access to money can become dependent on whether alternative channels such as USSD, ATMs, cards or physical branches remain available.
The UBA incident shows a wider challenge facing Nigeria’s digital economy: as financial services move increasingly from cash and branches to always-on digital platforms, reliability becomes as important as speed.
Mohd Hassan has extensive experience in news gathering, editing, and writing for the newswire industry, Contact – Info@impactnews-wire.com
Salif Keita (Mali)
Most Famous Song: “Africa”
Short Bio: Salif Keita (born 1949) is a Malian singer-songwriter, often referred to as the “Golden Voice of Africa.” He is known for his unique fusion of traditional Malian music with elements of jazz, R&B, and other international genres. As an albino, he has faced discrimination and uses his platform to raise awareness and advocate for the rights of albinos.
Fiend Oblivion
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Mule Lock
Before getting into a fight with an ugly person, remember that he has nothing to lose