Brace for M-Pesa downtime tomorrow, says Safaricom
A customer carries out an M-Pesa transaction.
M-Pesa services will be unavailable for about four hours late tomorrow night to pave way for a planned maintenance.
In a statement, Safaricom says its mobile money transfer service will not be available from 11.59pm Tuesday to 4am on Wednesday.
This means users will not be able to send and receive money through M-Pesa during the period.
“During the maintenance, all M-Pesa services including airtime purchase will be temporarily affected,” the telco said.
This as business digitisation has seen an increase in use of mobile money services in recent months.
Data from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) shows the total number of active registered mobile money subscriptions rose by 4.7 per cent to stand at 34.7 million in the four months to June.
Similarly, the number of mobile money agents grew to 283,357 from 275,907 recorded during the previous quarter.
Over 99 per cent of the total active mobile money subscribers in the country are subscribed to M-Pesa, underlining its dominance in the mobile money transfer market.
CA data shows M-Pesa users hit 34.2 million in June, while Airtel Kenya’s Airtel Money and Telkom’s T-Kash had 272,570 and 121,744 active mobile subscribers respectively.
