Last night, Kenya’s biggest mobile network, Safaricom, experienced an outage their mobile money service M-Pesa due to a problem in their database. The communication giant has this afternoon released a statement explaining that the outage was due to a slow database response which resulted in a reduction of the number of transactions being processed.
Update on M-PESA outage. #NaweKilaWakati pic.twitter.com/nT3pkD1RCZ
— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) December 9, 2018
In the statement, Safaricom stated that the outage began on Saturday at 7:04 pm but the services were brought back up at 10:53 pm.
“This led to the queuing of incoming transactions and a delay in responses to customers,” said Safaricom.
The mobile services provider further noted that the issue reoccurred on Sunday morning at 7:19 am “but was quickly resolved within 34 minutes.”
Safaricom also went ahead and issued an apology to their customers and partners for inconveniences caused by the outage adding that their engineers are currently working with officials from the Communications Authority (CA) as well as the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to ensure continuity of services.
“We reiterate our commitment to uphold a high level of operational excellence in all our products and services, and assure our customers that their funds remain secure at all times,” reads part of the statement.
The statement from Safaricom came a few hours after the Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and Technology Joe Mucheru, directed the CA to investigate the cause of the outage and forward a comprehensive report to his office, detailing remedial measures that Safaricom will take to prevent any future similar occurrences.
“Even as we ensure mobile services providers give uninterrupted services, we urge mobile money user s to have redundancies to guarantee continued services,” read the statement by CS Mucheru.
The CS further further confirmed that mobile money interoperability is now fully functional and subscribers can now move money in their wallets across different mobile money service providers.
Were you affected by the service disruption last night? Share with us your experience.