Every few months, Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) opens a new mobilisation cycle, ushering in thousands of graduates eager to register for the one-year mandatory national service or to obtain exemption letters if they are above the age limit of 30. For a country that produces more than half a million graduates yearly, the process should be straightforward. Instead, it has become a recurring national frustration, hampered by inefficient and unreliable digital infrastructure with what should be a simple online registration often turning into a registration nightmare.
The NYSC’s portal routinely crashes under heavy traffic. Confirmation emails arrive late or never at all, and many graduates are unable to complete registration before the deadline. Those affected are pushed to the next mobilisation batch, facing months-long delays that can derail career plans.
When registration for the 2025 Batch C Stream II opened on November 4, this pattern repeated itself. Within hours, the portal began to lag, blocking access, and displaying backend configuration codes. Confirmation emails failed to deliver. Even serving corps members were locked out of their dashboards while trying to print monthly clearance slips. Some were marked “absent” due to portal errors, despite having completed biometric verification at their local government secretariats.
As the outage stretched on, NYSC acknowledged the failure and extended registration by 48 hours, moving the deadline from November 9 to 11. Yet the fix offered little relief. Applicants continued to battle inaccessible pages, stalled biometric uploads, and incomplete registrations. Frustrated graduates flooded social media with complaints and screenshots of error messages.
“I was up at midnight when the portal opened,” AbdulHafeez Adewuyi, a biology graduate from the Federal University of Technology, Minna, told . “The system said a confirmation link had been sent, but it never arrived. I tried again with new email addresses, and nothing showed. By the time it finally came, it was too late, and the portal had started glitching again.”
For those who miss registration deadlines or complete the registration late, the consequences are steep; they are automatically rolled into the next stream, a chain reaction that creates backlogs and overcrowded orientation camps. The delays also impose emotional and financial strain. Following the portal error, the management announced that only about 40% of the registered Prospective Corps Members (PCMs) including backlogs from previous batches, can be accommodated for the upcoming orientation programme.
“I missed two batches because my confirmation email came a day late,” said a current corps member who asked not to be named. “I eventually joined months later, long after my friends had gone.”
The portal’s instability is not new. Every mobilisation, Batch A, B, or C, often begins with optimism and ends in apologies. The NYSC routinely blames network congestion and “high traffic,” yet the failures persist. During Batch A earlier this year, officials admitted the servers had been overwhelmed and again extended registration by two days; the same scenario occurred in the ongoing stream.
Both NYSC and Sidmach Technology Ltd., the company that manages the portal, did not respond to requests for comments regarding the persistent glitches.
Heavy traffic, poor infrastructure
Behind these recurring meltdowns lies a deeper problem: a public digital infrastructure built without scalability. Developers argue that the NYSC portal still runs on outdated single-server architecture incapable of handling heavy traffic, visits, and simultaneous logins.
An analysis of the NYSC portal using Similar Web conducted with software developer, Okwudili Canice, revealed traffic more than what the portal’s infrastructure could handle between November 3 and 9, when the portal suffered high glitches.
Within the earlier registration window, the portal received 7.85 million visits, but due to a severe glitch, the portal’s bounce rate, the rate at which visitors exited after landing on the page due to failed loads or error messages, spiked to 23%. Accessibility was notably worse for users on mobile browsers, where pages frequently froze or failed to open, recording 6.69 million visits by mobile.
Further checks with tools like Builtwith and Whois, suggested that the portal was built on an old .NET framework, APS.NET, hosted on local servers instead of scalable cloud servers like AWS or Microsoft Azure.
Canice explained that the portal’s underlying infrastructure is far too limited to manage the heavy traffic that accompanies each mobilisation cycle of hundreds of thousands of graduates racing to register. The impact, he said, would lead to auto-scaling, load balancing, and redundancy, often leading to timeouts and server errors.
“.NET infrastructure is outdated for this scale,” he told . “A national system that serves millions of graduates needs scalable cloud servers that can expand automatically when traffic surges.”
He added that the portal’s lack of redundancy, with no backup server to take over when the main one fails or worsens with each crash. “If there’s no failover setup, when one server crashes, everything stops,” he said. “That’s why NYSC’s downtime stretches into days.”
Canice also pointed out that the delayed confirmation emails many graduates complain about stem from poor backend configuration, not network congestion. He said the program is either on the backend or is being programmed not to be sent immediately.
“Email confirmation is one of the simplest features to automate,” he said. “If emails are delayed or missing, it means the backend is either throttling requests or too weak to handle them in real time.”
He noted that for a well-managed digital system, engineers typically receive real-time alerts when performance issues arise, allowing them to fix glitches before extending to more times. “But in NYSC’s case, there appears to be no visible technical urgency, and that is a clear gap in monitoring and response systems.”
The NYSC’s continued portal glitches and lack of long lasting fixes reflect a broader weakness in e-government portals often launched without redundancy, poor planning for peak periods, and little user support when issues arise.
