Safaricom CEO apologises for M-Pesa outage

Safaricom’s #ticker:SCOM chief executive officer Bob Collymore has apologised for the recent M-Pesa outage that left millions of customers unable to receive or send money.

Mr Collymore in a statement said that while M-Pesa’s system has received continuous system upgrades and innovations over the 11 years of its existence, the latest system’s failure resulted to the outage that lasted for hours.

The network outage persisted for hours. Safaricom attributed the hitch to a database problem.

The telco is estimated to have lost billions of shillings during the outage whose ripple effects on the economy were huge.

During the outage Safaricom customers had problems paying for electricity bills, shopping, sending money to relatives, and even placing bets with gambling firms.

“The messages that we received from our customers from all over the country, served to underscore the fact that M-Pesa has become an integral part of our lives.

“It is a critical means of paying for goods and services for many Kenyans – meaning that the effect of a system hitch will be felt fast and deeply,” said Collymore.

Establish cause of outage

The outage also saw the Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) Secretary Joe Mucheru order the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) to work with the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to establish causes of the outage.

“We are grateful to the millions of Kenyans who have bestowed their trust upon us, which we take as a serious duty,” he said.

He said that the firm is continuously looking for opportunities for innovations and partnership that drive positive impact on its customers by enabling them to conduct financial transaction anywhere in the world.
Collymore said that M-Pesa had opened up the global marketplace to both enterprise and retail customers by deriving value from partnerships with PayPal and Western Union.

CA statistics show that about Sh1.5 trillion moved through the M-Pesa platform in the three months to June, translating to an average Sh16.3 billion per day or about Sh679.3 million every hour.

The Sh1.5 trillion accounted for 79 percent of overall mobile money transfer in the quarter to June.