Gov't Orders Probe into Saturday Mpesa Outage

The Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) has ordered a probe into the countrywide Mpesa outage experienced for several hours on Saturday.

ICT Cabinet Secretary Joe Mucheru has directed the Communications Authority (CA) and the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to investigate the cause of the outage and submit a comprehensive report to his ministry.

Mucheru says the report must detail measures the telecommunications giant can take to prevent other outages in the future.

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

“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.”

In a statement on Saturday evening, Safaricom attributed the outage to hitches in its 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.

The mobile provider has since announced that services on the mobile cash platform have been restored.

“We wish to notify all our customers and partners that all MPesa services are now back up. We deeply regret any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience,” the company says in another statement.