Nairaland Founder Breaks Silence as Website Faces Shutdown Amidst ‘Abuse Report’ Uproar

This hiatus was triggered by an unnoticed abuse report, an issue that had flown under the radar until it resulted in a significant setback.

Investigations by Infostride News unveiled that the website had been inaccessible for approximately 12 hours, displaying a “Web server is down” error message.

The Founder of Infostride News, Seun Osewa, revealed through a social media platform (X) that the site’s hosting service suspended operations after discovering this unaddressed abuse report, which dated back to earlier in the month.

Osewa took to Twitter to narrate the sequence of events and the challenges faced in efforts to restore 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. Infostride News’ findings (using the website archive platform Wayback Machine) also indicate that the last time the site was online was late on the 18th of December.

However, as Infostride News experiences this temporary disruption, the incident underscores the ongoing challenges that platforms face in managing content responsibly while upholding the principle of freedom of expression.