KENYA:M-Pesa services to be unavailable on Monday morning

Mobile provider, Safaricom has announced that it will carry out maintenance on its M-Pesa system on Monday morning, making all services on the mobile money platform unavailable.

The M-Pesa services will undergo maintenance from Monday 1am to 1:30am.

In a statement on Saturday, Safaricom said that the maintenance is aimed at improving its services.

“As part of these ongoing enhancements, we will be carrying out planned system maintenance on the evening of Monday, June 24, 2024, from 1 am to 1.30 am,” the telco said in a statement.

During the maintenance, all M-Pesa services will be unavailable.

“The timing of this maintenance activity has been planned to result in the least of inconvenience to our customers.”

Safaricom, however, said all other services, including calls, data and SMS, will remain available.

In January, Safaricom was forced to issue an apology to its customers after a technical hitch that affected its mobile money service, M-Pesa, leaving thousands stranded.

“Our apologies for the inconvenience caused, we have a technical issue affecting M-Pesa, resolution is in progress, we ask for your patience,” Safaricom said on its social media accounts then.

The Treasury’s Budget Policy Statement (BPS) released in 2016 showed that a technology disaster affecting the M-Pesa-dominated mobile transactions was a fiscal risk, placing the money transfer systems among other potential threats to the economy that are watched keenly by policy wonks.

The authors of the report predicted that an M-Pesa outage would cause a loss of revenue — direct excise tax and corporate tax by firms running the systems — and reduce confidence in the services.

That was the first time the mobile money transfer system featured among the fiscal risks, indicative of the strategic importance it has acquired in Kenya’s economy barely a decade after the launch of M-Pesa

SOURCE: THE NAIROBINEWS/ Hilary Kimuyu