M-Pesa outage persists for second day running

By Macharia Kamau

The outage of Safaricom’s M-Pesa services continued for a second day running.  This inconvenienced millions of users who rely heavily on the money transfer for business and personal transactions.

Though Safaricom said it had rectified the Monday problem, a backlog of transactions was yet to be cleared, forcing customers to experience further difficulties throughout the day on Tuesday.

At one point, the M-Pesa system crashed under strain of pending transactions.

The major outage on M-Pesa is not a first, coming just two weeks after the firm carried out a major upgrade on the money transfer service. Previous outages, which have been frequent, have been attributed to fibre optic cable cuts.

System glitch

"We apologise to our M-Pesa customers for the system glitch that had earlier affected handset transactions. We are glad to report that our engineers have fixed the problem and all such transactions are now going through," said Safaricom’s Chief Executive, Bob Collymore, in a statement on Tuesday.

He, however, noted that while the routing problem had been resolved, there were delays caused by a build-up in pending transactions.

As of midday on Tuesday, the firm reported only 30 per cent of M-Pesa deals were being processed.

Most of the transactions delayed, while others failed. But Collymore assured customers their money was safe.

The interruptions over the last two days have inconvenienced millions of users who rely on the service for business and personal transactions.

M-Pesa has over 14 million customers and about 28,000 agent outlets.

Between its launch in 2007 and March, this year, the service has transferred about Sh828 billion.

"We regret the inconvenience, and wish to reassure our customers that their money is safe and M-Pesa remains a reliable means of cash transfer," Collymore added.

The statement by Safaricom said the outage started midday Monday and had been traced to a routing problem.

It affected all M-Pesa handset transactions.