Safaricom customers affected after Mshwari outage

Safaricom subscribers were on Friday morning affected after the telecommunications company experienced what they termed as a ‘technical hitch’ with the Mshwari service.

Mshwari is a paperless banking service offered through MPesa, the money transfer service.

It enables subscribers to open a bank account through their mobile phone without having to physically go to a bank or fill out forms.

Reports of interrupted Mshwari services emerged on Thursday evening as some sought explanations from the company’s customer services online.

They complained of transactions not reflecting in their Mshwari accounts after withdrawal to MPesa to which Safaricom Custome Care responded:

“Hi, apologies for the delayed response. We are experiencing a system challenge affecting the Mshwari Service and we are working towards resolving the issue. Apologies for the inconveniences caused. ^WN”

Several customers received this reply when they reported that they could access money in their Mshwari account.

The company is yet to release a formal statement on the issue.

Three days ago, a local newspaper reported that a customer had petitioned the company to pay all subscribers Ksh.10,000 following an outage of its MPesa services on December 8.

Martin Ndung’u argued that subscribers were inconvenienced as they could not pay utility bills or perform transactions on the MPesa platform.

According to him, the outage contravened the Customer Protection Act, 2012.

A day later, the ICT Cabinet Secretary Joe Mucheru ordered investigations into the outage that affected millions of subscribers.

“The ministry has instructed the CA to liaise with the CBK and investigate the cause of this outage and forward a report to government, including remedial measures Safaricom will take to ensure such an outage does not happen in the future,” he said in a statement.

An October report from the Communications Authority of Kenya showed that Safaricom has 29.7million subscribers.

The industry regulator said about Ksh.1.5 trillion was moved through MPesa in the three months to June.

This translates to an average of Ksh.16.3billion per day or an average of Ksh.679.3million every hour.