Business owners and registration agents across Nigeria have expressed frustration over the prolonged downtime of the Corporate Affairs Commission, CAC, online portal, which has reportedly remained inaccessible for at least three days.
The outage has prevented users from registering new businesses, reserving names, updating company records and accessing other corporate services normally handled through the commission’s online platform.
Checks showed that attempts to access the CAC portal repeatedly returned a “Bad Gateway” error with code 502, a server-related error that usually occurs when a gateway or proxy server receives an invalid response from an upstream server.
The development comes weeks after the commission temporarily shut down its online portal between April 17 and April 20, 2026, for scheduled maintenance.
A business registration agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the portal had not been opening since Friday.
“I tried opening their portal again this morning, and this is the message I keep seeing,” the agent said, while sharing a screenshot of the error message.
Several users also took to social media, especially the comment section of CAC’s X handle, to complain about the disruption.
One user, A. Lawal Textiles, criticised the commission for failing to issue a public update on 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, Inilayo Opuofoni, said the portal failure had made it impossible to reserve business names.
“Please, check on this, ‘Internal Server error’. We cannot reserve names,” the user wrote, while attaching a screenshot of the error.
Further review of complaints on the commission’s social media pages showed that some portal-related issues had been raised by users for months.
Efforts to reach the CAC helpdesk for clarification were unsuccessful, as the support line failed to connect beyond a repeated automated message indicating that the call was being transferred.
As of the time of filing this report, the commission had yet to publicly respond to the complaints on its social media channels.
The recurring portal disruptions come despite earlier assurances by the CAC that it was working to optimise its system for improved performance.
In July last year, the commission announced plans to enhance its portal shortly after unveiling an artificial intelligence-driven registration platform designed to simplify company registration and speed up approvals.
However, in April this year, the CAC confirmed a security breach involving unauthorised access to parts of its systems and advised users to update their login credentials as a precautionary measure.
The continued technical difficulties may further slow down business formalisation efforts in Nigeria, particularly for small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs who depend on the CAC portal for company registration and compliance filings.
