Safaricom Summoned by Communications Authority of Kenya Over M-Pesa Outage
Kenyan mobile network operator Safaricom has been summoned by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), over the power outage on the mobile money platform M-Pesa.
The chairperson of the Departmental Committee on Communication, Information, and Innovation John Kiarie said that Safaricom’s management and the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) are expected to shed light on the successive outages, which have rocked businesses and inconvenienced customers.
The East African country’s communication authority said a communication breakdown of over an hour is intolerable, and Safaricom has been summoned to explain the blackout for an action to be taken.
Recall that Safaricom’s mobile money platform M-Pesa was hit with a downtime on Monday, which inconvenienced millions of customers who rely on it for daily transactions.
Monday’s M-Pesa disruption was the latest in a series of glitches, with the service suffering an outage for several hours earlier this month and August last year that ravaged bank-to-M-Pesa transfers.
The recent outage saw millions of Kenyans who rely on M-Pesa for their financial transactions such as paying for utilities like electricity, fuel, and parking fees or purchasing items such as food and medicine in supermarkets and chemists stranded with unpaid bills.
Safaricom, which has 27.7 million subscribers, explained in an earlier statement that they suffered a technical issue and their services are being restored. The telecoms company after resolving the issue apologised to its users.
The company said in a notice to customers,
“We experienced service intermittency with PayBill payments that resulted in some transactions not being completed on M-Pesa. The technical issue has since been resolved, and we continue to monitor the services closely. We apologize for any inconvenience that this disruption may have caused.”
It is worth noting that the possibility of telecommunications service outages has in the past been viewed by government experts as a threat to the economy, especially for critical services such as money transfers.
M-Pesa accounts for about 99.9 percent of the value of mobile money transactions in Kenya, underlining the entrenchment of the platform in the economy.
