Airtel Kenya services restored as customers demand compensation

Airtel Kenya services have been reportedly restored after an outage on Wednesday that affected calls and SMS services.

The mobile telco had cited technical challenges as the reason behind the outage.

“You can now make calls and send messages. We apologize for any inconvenience caused,” the company said in a statement.

This comes after Airtel Uganda also reported a network outage due to technical disruption on October 9.

Industry data from the regulator shows that the telecoms operator controls 33.3% of the voice market in Kenya.

According to the Communications Authority, mobile telcos are expected to maintain 99.99 per cent service provision standards.

Those who fail to meet the regulations risk fines of between Ksh. 500,000 to 0.2 per cent of the telco’s gross turnover, a report in one of the local dailies reads.

Airtel Kenya’s main rival, Safaricom, revealed that cost of fines for non-compliance as Ksh. 294million in 2017 and Ksh.157million the previous year.

The company’s Sustainable Business Report however noted zero fines for 2018 and 2019 financial years.

On Wednesday, some Airtel Kenya subscribers took to Twitter to express their frustration with the network outage.

“Currently, Airtel Kenya is down, no calls going through, data is also down, as a consumer I think we have a right of compensation for outages, Let’s retweet this for compensation even free data or call days,” one Mutai said.

https://twitter.com/juliuskitevu/status/1184444371657265153?s=20

Airtel outage has lasted more than a day…they should just close shop and go home…what a joke

— Kachwanya (@kachwanya) October 16, 2019

Hello @AIRTEL_KE

Compensate your customers for the losses incurred due to network outage yesterday. 5gb data valid for one month si mbaya.

— Fredrick Mirikau™️ (@MirikauFredrick) October 17, 2019

https://twitter.com/Asheru92/status/1184727369808011264?s=20

Many people have airtel office lines. @AIRTEL_KE how do you have a whole day of network outage? That is below mediocre.

— alice (@alicewwanjohi) October 16, 2019

It is huge shame that a critical company like @AIRTEL_KE can experience outage for a whole day. How come they never planned for such eventuality??
Losing people business badly

— Kenya (@KenyaFire) October 16, 2019