Government orders probe into Saturdays M-Pesa outage

The government has directed the Communications Authority to liaise with the Central Bank of Kenya to investigate the cause of Safaricom’s mobile money service, M-Pesa, outage experienced on Saturday.

In a statement to newsrooms on Sunday, Information, Communications and Technology CS Joe Mucheru further instructed the two bodies to forward to his ministry a comprehensive report detailing remedial measures that Safaricom will take to prevent future outages.

“Even as we ensure mobile services providers give uninterrupted services, we urge mobile money users to have redundancies to guarantee continued services,” reads the statement by CS Mucheru.

“We wish to inform the public that in line with ensuring we have a competitive market, mobile money interoperability is now fully functional. Subscribers can now move money in their wallets across different mobile money service providers.”

M-Pesa was unavailable for the better part of Saturday evening and a few hours into Sunday morning due to hitches in Safaricom’s database.

“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,” said Safaricom in a statement on Saturday.

According to the telecommunications provider, however, the services are now back to normal.

Update on M-PESA outage: All services are now back up. #NaweKilaWakati pic.twitter.com/CmnFaolOq1

— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) December 8, 2018