Physical Address
60 Ekwema Cres, Layout 460281, Imo
Facebook and TikTok Videos are Now Driving Nigeria’s Record Internet Traffic
Nigeria’s internet has just hit a new high! In March 2024, the country’s internet traffic reached 1 terabit per second. That’s a huge amount of data moving every second—enough for 200,000 people to watch high-quality videos all at the same time without any problems. This big jump is mostly because many Nigerians are watching videos on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube more than ever before.
This shows how Nigeria’s internet is growing fast. Before, most internet data had to travel outside the country before coming back, which made things slower and more expensive. Now, thanks to a local system called the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), much of the internet traffic stays inside the country. This helps make the internet faster and cheaper for everyone.
Read Next: Kenya Plans to Remove Risk-based Loan Pricing in an Effort to Lower Interest Rates
Muhammed Rudman, the CEO of IXPN, said that 1 terabit per second means a million people can be on calls or video meetings at the same time. He also said it means 200,000 people can watch videos or Netflix without any delays. Without IXPN, all this data would have to go out of Nigeria, making things slower and costing more.
Nigeria is now the second biggest internet hub in Africa, just behind South Africa. The big reason for this growth is the huge number of people watching videos online. As of early 2025, Nigeria has about 38.7 million Facebook users, 37.4 million TikTok users, and 27 million YouTube users. In October 2024, YouTube said Nigerians spent 55% more time watching videos than the year before, with over 30 million people watching.
When IXPN started in 2006, internet traffic was very small, only a few megabits per second. Things began to change in 2011 when Google connected to IXPN. This connection helped traffic grow quickly, and by 2019, traffic had reached 126 gigabits per second. By the end of 2024, it was almost 1 terabit per second.
Big companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Starlink, TikTok, and Netflix now connect directly to IXPN. This means a lot of the data from these platforms stays inside Nigeria instead of going abroad. Rudman explained that some companies send up to 70% of their traffic through IXPN. This saves money because less data has to travel far away.
Keeping data local helps everyone. Internet speeds get faster, videos load smoothly, and internet costs go down. This is great news for Nigerians who use the internet every day for work, school, or fun. It also shows that Nigeria is becoming more independent when it comes to its internet.
Facebook and TikTok videos are playing a big role in driving Nigeria’s record internet traffic. More people watching videos means more data moving inside the country, which makes the internet better for all of us. Nigeria’s internet is growing stronger, faster, and more affordable, and this is just the beginning.
Was this information useful? Drop a nice comment below. You can also check out other useful contents by following us on X/Twitter @siliconafritech, Instagram @Siliconafricatech, or Facebook @SiliconAfrica.
