Airtel faces fines from regulator over network outage

Airtel Kenya is risking punishment from the telecoms regulator after an outage knocked out services for several hours.

The operator, the second largest behind Safaricom, suffered the outage from Monday night and the hitch persisted to press time at 7 pm Wednesday.

This left its 12.83 million subscribers out of reach and without access to calls, SMS, data and mobile financial services, especially cash sent to its network from rival M-Pesa.

The Communications Authority (CA) is likely to fine Airtel should the outage be deemed to be the product of omissions by the firm. On Wednesday, however, CA said it was too early to tell if the company would be fined, since the cause of the outage was not clear.

Outages caused by factors beyond the control of an operator, technically known as force majeure, usually do not attract sanctions.

“The authority has already commenced its investigations into the matter and is awaiting a detailed account of the cause of the downtime,” CA said in response to the Business Daily’s questions.

“It should be noted, however, it is upon considering multiple factors based on the findings of an investigation that the authority decides how much a penalty should be or even whether a fine should be applied at all.”

The law provides that an operator in breach be fined up to 0.2 percent of the firm’s revenues, which could run into hundreds of millions.

Airtel Wednesday admitted the service interruption without specifying the exact cause in a day when its subscribers expressed their displeasure via social media.

“We are currently having some technical challenges with our network. Due to this, calls and SMS messages will be intermittent. We are working to resolve this on priority and we shall keep you updated,” said the telco in a statement.

Airtel was early yesterday morning advising its subscribers to shift the network settings to the lower grade 2G network for calls and text messages. The 2G network is mostly used in rural Kenya and does not support fast internet.

In response to the Business Daily’s queries, the firm said it would communicate once the outage has been resolved and normal services restored.

“Our engineers have identified the issue and are working to expedite the restoration of the service as soon as possible,” said the telco. In 2017, Airtel was fined Sh26.6 million by CA for failing to meet the set standards on call quality in a period that saw its rival Safaricom slapped with a hefty penalty of Sh270 million. Telkom Kenya paid Sh14.9 million for quality breaches during the same period.

Airtel has been gaining subscribers faster than rival firms, cutting Safaricom’s dominant market share. The CA report for the three months to June 2019 showed that Airtel had a subscriber market share of 24.6 percent compared to Safaricom’s 63.5 percent. By contrast, as at end of June 2014, Airtel’s share of subscribers was 16 percent compared with Safaricom’s 68 percent.

Telecommunications service outages have also been viewed as a threat to the economy, especially for critical services such as money transfers. A 2016 National Treasury report warned that a collapse of the M-Pesa service would for instance cause widespread disruption in the economy.

Last year, M-Pesa also had a downtime, inconveniencing customers. The outage saw Information, Communications and Technology Secretary Joe Mucheru direct CA to carry out an investigation and issue a report.

The platform handled a total of 649.3 million transactions valued at Sh1.7 trillion in three months to June 2019, showing its growing significance to the economy.