Kenyan mobile service provider Safaricom suffered a complete outage of their mobile money transfer M-PESA service over the weekend, after a power outage on a Vodafone server in Germany damaged server discs.
Safaricom Chief Executive Officer Bob Collymore said in a statement that money residing within the service was safe and secure, and that they will be working around the clock in order to get the service functional again.
“Our technical teams both here and in Germany are working to restore normal services as soon as possible. We are optimistic that our technical teams will restore normal service by end of day. We would like to assure our customers that their funds remain safe. We appeal for patience during this time and regret the inconvenience caused,” Collymore said in a statement at the time of the outage.
As a result of the outage, M-Pesa customers were unable to send money, deposit cash or make withdrawals from ATMs, buy airtime, bank to M-PESA, pay bills and buy goods or conducting web transactions.
According to Capital FM, “the operator has suffered technical problems with the M-PESA service before in recent months. Service was disrupted during a systems upgrade in April and from another cable break the operator suffered at the end of last year.”
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
