Safaricom to switch M-Pesa off for routine maintenance

What you need to know:

New registrations, PIN changes and account activations will be unavailable in the 24 hours leading up to the shutdown.
M-Pesa services will not be available from 11pm Saturday March 21, 2015, and will resume at 8am Sunday March 22.

Safaricom plans to completely shut down its popular M-Pesa money transfer service for nine hours this weekend to allow for a “scheduled maintenance”.

New customer registrations, personal identification number (PIN) changes and account activations will be unavailable in the 24 hours leading up to the shutdown. This includes signing up for M-Shwari and M-Kesho accounts.

“All M-Pesa services will not be available from 11pm Saturday March 21, 2015, and will resume at 8am Sunday March 22, 2015,” the Kenya-based company said in an advertisement placed in local dailies.

They, however, say this is normal maintenance and not the anticipated switchover to local hosting of M-Pesa servers.

The mobile giant had earlier revealed plans to transfer all M-Pesa servers from Germany to Kenya by the beginning of April, promising users of the mobile money transfer service a more reliable system.

READ: Safaricom set to transfer M-Pesa servers by April

The installation of M-Pesa servers locally is expected to end nearly eight years of foreign hosting, which has at times been cited for delayed response to service interruptions.

Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore has said the new M-Pesa platform is expected to be completed by end of March.

“We will be running a parallel network from time to time while undergoing test runs,” Mr Collymore told Business Daily in an interview last December. “Thereafter, we will have a complete switch over. We expect the new platform located here will have bigger capacity, be much faster and allow other merchants to connect directly to the platform.”