Kenyan Communications Authority to investigate Safaricom network outage

26 November 2019

Over the weekend, Safaricom experienced nationwide network outages – restricting up to 31.8 million consumers from calling, using MPESA or texting, all across the country.

Safaricom risks facing fines after nationwide network outages over the weekend.

During the outage, the company said in an official statement, “Please note that we are experiencing intermittent network challenges affecting a number of services in our network including voice and data for some customers. We are working to restore all services as soon as possible. We are sorry for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience”.

The telecoms provider provided no reason as to why the network was down and has since restored its services – however, not before it was reported that Kenya’s Communications Authority would be looking into the disruption.

“The authority will certainly investigate and seek to know the cause of the downtime,” a source told TechWeez. “Safaricom is in a unique situation where a network outage would cause a threat to the economy. A lot of people rely on their voice, data and MPESA services to run their businesses so it is critical that they maintain 99.99% uptime at any one time.”

Safaricom is currently Kenya’s largest telecoms provider with over 34 million active consumers – meaning, if their network is down, it’ll impact a massive portion of the population.

“Service outages are the last thing a network like Safaricom would want since it puts them at risk of penalties from the regulator. If Safaricom is found liable, they will be fined up to 0.2% of their revenues according to the law, which in their case could be hundr of millions of shillings.”

This is not the first time the network provider has experienced outages in 2019. In August, Safaricom consumers were impacted by an outage that affected data services.

Edited by Jenna Delport

Follow Jenna Delport on Twitter

Follow IT News Africa on Twitter

IT NewskenyaKenya network providerKenya tech newsSafaricomSafaricom KenyaSafaricom Newstech newstechnology news