Ministry of ICT launches investigation into M-Pesa service outage

The Government has ordered probe into the circumstances that led to the Safaricom M-Pesa service outage, which happened on Saturday, December 8.

A statement from the Ministry of ICT has revealed that the Cabinet Secretary in charge, Joe Mucheru, has directed the Communication Authority to work with Central Bank of Kenya, to ascertain causes of the hitch.

“The Ministry has instructed the CA to liaise with CBK and investigate the cause of this outage and forward a report to government, including remedial measures Safaricom will take to ensure this outage does not happen in the future,” reads the statement partially.

The ministry has appealed to the subscribers to have extra platforms so that such occurrence may not affect their transactions in the future.

This statement signed by Mucheru comes hours after Safaricom’s mobile money transfer platform experienced hitches on Saturday, affecting millions of users.

The telecommunication company attributed the hitch to a problem in their database.

Statement of apology from company’s twitter page read:

"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."