Frustrated GoTV users seek refund over service outage

On Tuesday night, many Nigerian GoTV subscribers, particularly football fans, were left frustrated as several channels, including popular sports channels, suddenly disappeared.

The outage, which coincided with the highly anticipated return of the UEFA Champions League, caused subscribers to miss out on their favorite clubs’ matches, leading to widespread dissatisfaction.

Affected channels included SS BLITZ Africa, SS Football Africa, SS La Liga Africa, ESPN, and others like M-Net Movies 4, ROK, and Africa Magic Epic. Subscribers expressed their outrage, demanding compensation from MultiChoice, GoTV’s parent company, during interviews on Wednesday.

Investigations revealed that the service disruption was caused by a severe power failure of the Intelsat 33e satellite, which serves Europe, Africa, and other regions, leaving customers without access to several channels. Many viewers criticized MultiChoice for not communicating the issue promptly.

“I’ve never been in this situation before. I use both GoTV and DSTV. On Champions League nights, there are usually many matches, so I use GoTV to show the games that my customers want to watch.

“I was shocked when I couldn’t find any of the sports channels. I thought there might be an issue with the antenna, so I tried changing the location, but the problem persisted.

“I checked the menu for any messages to customers about the disruption, but there was nothing. It was a catastrophe,” Sanjo lamented.

Another subscriber, Adebola Oluwatosin, who identified himself as a devoted Real Madrid fan, while demanding compensation from MultiChoice for the service failure, described his experience on Tuesday as disturbing.

“If I knew something was wrong with them (GoTV), I would stay with my friend who owns a DSTV to see the Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund match.

“I bought fuel because there was no power supply at the time, only to find that all the sports channels had disappeared. I had just paid for a subscription of 13,900.

“They need to compensate us. Since this is a monthly subscription, will they extend the expiration date to account for the days the channels were unavailable? We need answers,” Oluwatosin demanded.

When contacted on Wednesday, the company’s spokesperson, Caroline Oghuma, stated that MultiChoice was working to restore services for all its customers.

“We are experiencing a temporary disruption in our services due to a technical issue with one of our satellite providers, Intelsat.