National Treasury Schedules Two e-Citizen Downtimes in November

The National Treasury has announced that Kenya’s e-Citizen portal will be taken offline for scheduled maintenance on two consecutive weekends in November 2026.

The public notice, released by the Government Digital Payments Department on November 5 and signed by Treasury Principal Secretary Chris Kiptoo, sets the first outage from 10 pm on Saturday November 7 to 5 am on Sunday November 8, and the second from 10 pm on Saturday November 14 to 5 am on Sunday November 15.

"During these periods, users may experience temporary service interruptions or limited access to e-Citizen services," the notice reads, and it urges members of the public to plan accordingly and complete any urgent transactions before the scheduled maintenance.

The Treasury describes the work as a system upgrade intended to improve performance, strengthen security and ensure the continued reliability of the platform that hosts more than 22,000 government services, including passport applications, business registration, land transactions, driving-licence renewals and tax payments.

The portal also functions as the central revenue collection gateway for national and county governments, handling up to KSh1 billion daily, a rise from under KSh60 million in the manual era.

The maintenance follows a year of intermittent disruptions that affected thousands of users, such as login failures and missing data in March 2026, stalled M-Pesa payment confirmations for licence renewals the same month, and three-day difficulties generating eTIMS invoices for taxpayers in August 2026.

In October 2026 the Treasury formally assumed responsibility for managing e-Citizen after parliamentary scrutiny over its ownership and revenue handling, and subsequently proposed regulations to establish a clear legal framework for the platform’s ownership, hosting, administration and maintenance.

A Public Accounts Committee report earlier highlighted that over KSh6.3 billion had been diverted from e-Citizen into a private account and identified multiple collection accounts opened without the required constitutional approval.

The Treasury expressed regret for any inconvenience caused and thanked the public for their patience as the upgrades are carried out.