Customers with deposits on the mobile money service were unable to access their money or apply for loans.
Commercial Bank of Africa in a statement confirmed the outage that started at 10pm on the Christmas eve.
Safaricom’s #ticker:SCOM mobile money platform M-Shwari was unavailable over the Christmas period as the platform underwent an emergency maintenance.
Millions of users of the popular platform were unable to do any transactions on the service—including not being able to access their deposits, loans or even pay their due loans.
The outage is also likely to have caused particular inconvenience to customers, coming at a festive period when spending usually goes up.
The Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA), which runs the service in partnership with Safaricom, said the outage started on Sunday at 10pm
The outage has been resolved and services were back to normal by Monday, CBA said.
“We have since resolved the technical issues and the M-Shwari customers are now able to transact normally,” Isaac Awuondo, CBA chief executive said in a statement on Monday.
He added: “As we worked to restore services, we worked closely with all our stakeholders who were informed of the remedial actions taken. We deeply regret the inconvenience to our customers during this festive season…”
Started earlier
On Sunday at around 11:40am, an attempt to transact on the M-Shwari returned the message that the service was undergoing maintenance, indicating that the outage could have started earlier than indicated.
A day later, a message indicated that M-Shwari was under emergency maintenance and was working to restore the service by 6pm
M-Shwari is undergoing emergency maintenance and is unable to process your request at this time. We are working to restore the service by 6.00pm,” the message read at 3.52pm.
Users took to social media on Sunday to complain that they could not access their savings and other services.
"Am trying to withdraw money from m-shwari and am receiving this message 'Failed to authenticate the transaction by limit rule Minimum Withdrawal Account Balance.' what's wrong?" Timothy Murithi posted on Twitter Sunday.
Another Twitter user, Bonface Aloo, asked, "What's up with your m-shwari thing. So we can't withdraw our money to use it for holidays?"
