A customer being served at an Safaricom's M-PESA point. PHOTO | FILE |
What you need to know:
Last weekend, M-Pesa shut down as the platform's servers were moved from Germany to Kenya, ending close to eight years of foreign hosting.
Hardly a week after Safaricom’s M-Pesa “came home”, its operations stalled for more than three hours on Friday, leaving customers guessing.
Subscribers have complained of experiencing delays when sending or receiving messages on the network.
"Safaricom regrets to inform its subscribers that an issue with its Core Network is currently affecting SMS services. The problem, which began at 05:00am on the morning of April 24th 2015, is affecting subscribers intermittently," a statement from the telco read.
It also said that while subscribers would experience delays in receiving confirmation messages following M-Pesa transactions, all transactions made were still successful and account balances would remain intact.
Last weekend, M-Pesa shut down its services as the platform's servers were moved from Germany to Kenya, ending close to eight years of foreign hosting. The service was down from Saturday 18th at 11pm and resumed the following day at around 4pm.
Safaricom had indicated that after the migration that processing of transactions would be more efficient than before with 900 transactions per second compared to an earlier 450 transactions per second.
“The second generation M-Pesa platform has a bigger capacity, is much faster and will allow other merchants to connect directly to the platform, unlocking a new era of transformational mobile financial services,” the company's general manager for financial services Betty Mwangi-Thuo said earlier at a media briefing.
The new M-pesa system is expected to lead to improved services including minimised service outages, fewer delays and easier integration for third parties.
Safaricom has also kicked off plans to spread M-Pesa services to 19 African countries following an agreement signed by Vodafone and MTN. M-Pesa currently has around 19.95million subscribers with about 250,000 agents.
