Safaricom announces 4-hour M-Pesa service interruption

By Peter Ochieng

M-Pesa customers have been notified of lack of services for slightly over four hours, later today.

Telecommunications company Safaricom which runs M-Pesa on Tuesday announced that all services on the mobile money platform will be unavailable, due to a scheduled system maintenance.

The maintenance is scheduled to run from 11pm to 3:30 am. “To enable us to continue to give you the best M-PESA experience we have scheduled a system maintenance on Tuesday 10th September 2024 from 11:00 PM to Wednesday 11th September 3:30 AM,” the company said.

As such, services such as bill payments, money transfers, cash withdrawals and airtime purchases will be unavailable during this time.

“All other services including calls, data and SMS will remain available as usual,” added Safaricom.

M-Pesa was launched in 2007 by Safaricom and Vodafone, and has since expanded to Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Lesotho, Ghana, Egypt, Afghanistan, South Africa and Ethiopia.

The rollouts in India, Romania and Albania were terminated amid low market uptake. The platform allows users to deposit, withdraw, transfer money, pay for goods and services, access credit and savings, all with a mobile device.

By 2010, it had become the most successful mobile-phone-based financial service in the developing world.

By 2012, a stock of about 17 million M-Pesa accounts had been registered in Kenya, and by June 2016, a total of 7 million M-Pesa accounts had been opened in Tanzania by Vodacom.