GoTV subscribers, particularly football fans, were left frustrated on Tuesday night when multiple channels unexpectedly went off-air.
The outage prompted many customers to demand compensation from Multichoice, GoTV’s parent company, in interviews conducted on Wednesday. The timing was especially frustrating for football enthusiasts eager to watch their favorite teams in the UEFA Champions League, which returned that night.
However, many GoTV users were disappointed when key sports channels like SS BLITZ Africa, SS Football Africa, SS La Liga Africa, SS Select 1, SS Select 2, and ESPN suddenly disappeared. Other channels, including M-Net Movies 4, ROK, Africa Magic Epic, CNN International, Al Jazeera, and Channels Television, had also gone offline earlier in the week and had not been restored by the time of this report.
The disruption was reportedly caused by a major power failure on the Intelsat 33e satellite, which serves Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia-Pacific. The failure, which occurred on Saturday, severely impacted service for all customers, including MultiChoice, according to a report from Developing Telecoms, a UK-based platform.
Many football fans expressed outrage at missing key matches and criticized MultiChoice for not providing timely updates about the issue. A viewing center owner in Ojodu Berger, who uses both GoTV and DSTV, shared his frustration. “I’ve never encountered this before,” he said. “I couldn’t find any of the sports channels during the Champions League games. I even tried adjusting the antenna, but nothing worked. There was no message about the problem—it was a disaster.”
Another subscriber, Adebola Oluwatosin, a Real Madrid supporter, called for compensation from MultiChoice after being unable to watch his team’s match. “I had just paid 13,900 for a subscription, bought fuel to watch the game, and then found out the sports channels were gone. They should extend the subscription or compensate us for the lost days,” he said.
In response, MultiChoice spokesperson Caroline Oghuma confirmed that the company was working to restore services and attributed the disruption to technical issues with their satellite provider, Intelsat.