We have become a cashless society and for most Kenyans, mobile money is how we operate. Whether it’s paying for your shopping, fuelling your car or even buying airtime. In fact, do you remember the last time you bought an actual scratch card?
While mobile money is convenient and efficient, it’s technology and we all know that at one point or another, technology will fail. Last night, Safaricom’s M-Pesa experienced an outage that inconvenienced a number of users especially because they did not inform their customers of any maintenance activities or anything of the sort.
According to the giant telecommunication company, the outage was caused by a problem in their database.
Our Position Statement on the M-PESA Outage. pic.twitter.com/dXeUvDAMZU
— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) December 8, 2018
“We regret to notify our customers and partners that M-Pesa services are currently unavailable due to a database degradation leading to loss of service. Our engineers are are working to restore services as soon as possible,” read a tweet from Safaricom PLC.
While M-Pesa services were restored after a few hours, the Government has now ordered a probe into the circumstances that led to the Safaricom M-Pesa service outage which happened last night, Saturday, December 8, 2018.
In a statement from the Ministry of Information and Communications, the Cabinet Secretary, Joe Mucheru, has now directed the Communication Authority (CA) to work with Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to establish the causes of the hitch.
The Ministry has noted with concern the outage experienced by M-pesa services yesterday and today. @CA_Kenya instructed to investigate the cause of this outage. @mucheru @CBKKenya @fhersy @jeroch1 pic.twitter.com/98bmSo9tSQ
— Ministry of ICT (@MoICTKenya) December 9, 2018
“The Ministry has instructed the CA to liaise with CBK and investigate the cause of this outage and forward a report to government, including remedial measures Safaricom will take to ensure this outage does not happen in the future,” reads part of the statement.
CS Joe Mucheru assured Kenyans that mobile money transfer across different networks in Kenya is now fully operational.
“Subscribers can now move money in their wallets across different mobile money service providers,” he said.
The CS further appealed to the subscribers to have extra platforms so that such occurrence may not affect their transactions in the future.
“Even as we ensure mobile service providers give uninterrupted services, we urge mobile money users to have redundancies to ensure continued services,” Mr. Mucheru said in the press statement.
This statement from the ICT Ministry comes a few hours after Safaricom’s mobile money transfer platform experienced an outage that affected millions of users.