Business owners and registration agents across Nigeria are facing growing frustration following the prolonged outage of the Corporate Affairs Commission portal.
Checks showed that the website of the Corporate Affairs Commission has remained inaccessible for at least three days, disrupting business registration and company update processes.
Users attempting to access the platform were repeatedly met with a “502 Bad Gateway” error message. The error typically means that a server acting as a gateway received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The development comes only weeks after the Commission announced a temporary shutdown of its online portal between April 17 and April 20, 2026, for scheduled maintenance.
A business registration agent who spoke anonymously said the platform had been inaccessible since Friday.
“The CAC portal haven’t been opening since Friday till today,” the agent said while sharing a screenshot of the error message.
Further checks on social media platform X showed that several Nigerians were experiencing similar issues with the portal.
One user criticised the Commission for failing to communicate publicly about the outage.
“The CAC ICRP website is down since yesterday and there was no public address on it by any of your social channels, what an unorganised agency,” the user wrote.
Another user complained that the outage had stopped users from reserving business names.
“Please, check on this, ‘Internal Server error’. We cannot reserve names,” the user posted alongside an error screenshot.
A review of comments under CAC posts also suggested that users have experienced portal-related issues for several months.
As of the time this report was filed, the Commission had yet to respond publicly to the growing complaints on its social media pages.
In July last year, the CAC announced plans to optimise its portal to improve user experience and system performance.
The announcement followed the unveiling of a new Artificial Intelligence-driven registration portal designed to simplify company registration and speed up approval processes for businesses in Nigeria.
However, concerns around the Commission’s digital infrastructure intensified in April this year after the CAC confirmed a security breach involving unauthorised access to parts of its systems.
The agency advised users to update their login credentials as a precautionary measure.
The confirmation came after allegations by Dark Web Informer, an anonymous X account, which claimed that about 25 million documents had been exfiltrated from CAC infrastructure.
Industry observers believe the recurring portal issues could create additional challenges for small businesses and startups trying to formalise their operations in Nigeria.
