After Safaricom’s Monday outage which is reported to have cost the firm and its customers several millions of shillings, the firm has announced a 24 hour lift on M-Pesa transfer costs between its over 26.6 million subscribers.
In a statement, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore said, “I truly appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding as we worked to resolve the issue and sincerely thank you for staying connected to Safaricom. As a small gesture, from midnight tonight to midnight tomorrow, all our customers will be able to send money on the M-PESA network for free.”
The outage affected voice, SMS and data, M-PESA and enterprise but M-PESA being the firm’s most popular service with revenues north of Ksh 41 billion and the third biggest telcom revenue earner behind voice at Ksh 90.8 billion and an amalgamation of services at Ksh 177.8 billion.
According to Collymore, Safaricom had two traffic outlets which failed rapidly one after the other. In response, as a priority, the team very quickly started operating the affected functions from its redundant equipment in order to restore services. All services had been restored and the firm is working to ensure that network stability continues.
“Once again, we would like to apologise for all inconvenience caused. Thank you for staying on our network,” he concluded.
Safaricom serves over 26.6 million subscribers and provide over 200,000 touch points for its customers and offering over 100 different products under its portfolio. The Monday morning outage caused panic among the majority of the population in Kenya as Safaricom serves over 61 percent of the country’s adult population and enterprises also rely on it for data, hosting and a number of other services apart from just voice, SMS, data and M-Pesa. The outage is likely to see more Safaricom’s loyal customers get backup plans for Internet, voice and mobile financial services to route their customers in case such an incident recurs.
