The result viewing portal of the Independent National Electoral Commission suffered a system collapse that forced it offline for several hours on Saturday, Peoples Gazette has learnt, spawning a severe backlog in the transmission of presidential election results over the high throughput infrastructure. 

The so-called IReV, which the electoral office designed to receive election result sheets directly from polling units across the country, suffered an outage shortly after polls were closing on Saturday afternoon. Polling agents were unable to upload results from the presidential election, while only a few attempts to upload federal parliamentary election results were successful. 

The Gazette started observing the crisis around 1:30 p.m. when some results that had been announced at polling units were not being uploaded on the server. The problem persisted until about 10 p.m. when sources at INEC began admitting that there was a problem with the transmission infrastructure. 

“We have problems with our servers for several hours,” an INEC commissioner told The Gazette by telephone at 10:28 p.m. ’’But we have finally been able to fix it about five minutes ago.”

Today’s development marked a sharp contrast to previous deployments of IReV, which was first designed in 2015 and introduced to the public in 2020. In Ondo, Anambra, Ekiti and Osun off-cycle elections, the portal received final results immediately as election workers were uploading them from polling units.

The Gazette confirmed that the portal had returned online at about the time the commissioner stated. Still, the failure underscored concerns about the commission’s ability to securely and reliably control its infrastructure for election management.

A significant trove of results so far uploaded and seen by The Gazette was not legible, while some others were completely blurred by camera flashes. The portal was designed to take results from 176,606 polling units, and it was unclear what share of the total will be affected by the widespread irregularities in capturing and uploading the results.

Millions of Nigerians took to polling centres across the country to elect the next president as Muhammadu Buhari’s two terms of eight years wrap up in May. Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party are the three main candidates standing in today’s election.

Frustrated citizens on Twitter mentioned their inability to view results on INEC’s portal, with some appearing to express doubt about the process.

It was not immediately learnt whether or not the collapse had any outside interference, and two spokespeople for the electoral office were not available for comments late Saturday.