Nigeria shut down the operator of its US visa application centres this week, effective immediately, with no advance notice to anyone whose application was already in progress.

If you had an appointment booked with OIS Services this week to submit a Nigerian visa application in the United States, that appointment no longer means anything. The Nigeria Immigration Service announced on Thursday that it had disengaged Online Integrated Solution, the company that has run Nigeria's visa application and submission centres across the US, effective immediately.

No warning. No transition window. One statement from the NIS spokesman, Deputy Comptroller Akinsola Akinlabi, and the arrangement that thousands of applicants relied on was gone.

Applicants are now told to go directly to the Nigerian embassy in Washington DC, or the consulates in New York and Atlanta. If you live in Houston, or Seattle, or anywhere that is not within easy reach of those three cities, that instruction is not a small inconvenience. It is a plane ticket, or a very long drive, added to a process you thought you had already handled.

The NIS did not say why it ended the OIS arrangement. No fraud allegation, no service complaint, no expired contract was cited publicly. The Consulate General in New York simply confirmed that OIS had "discontinued the collection and submission of visa applications." That is a passive sentence covering an active decision that somebody made, for reasons nobody outside government has been told.

One detail worth holding onto. The suspension only touches in person applications through the old centres. The e-Visa portal remains open, and applicants can still apply online. If your visa need can go through that channel, it still works. If it cannot, because you need biometrics done in person or your application type requires the old centre, you are now improvising.

This lands on more than 400,000 Nigerians living in the US, plus anyone else applying for a Nigerian visa from American soil. A parent trying to bring a child home for a funeral. A student who needs to renew documentation before the new academic year. A business traveller who booked a flight around an appointment that has just evaporated.

The same thing keeps showing up today, just in a quieter register. When the system decides to move, on a deportation list, on a police stop, on a service contract, it moves in a day. What takes time is the explanation to the people standing in the gap it leaves behind. If you had an OIS appointment this month, contact the embassy or consulate directly. Ask in writing what happens to the application you already started.