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Safaricom blames service outage on fibre link cuts

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A Safaricom outlet Moi Avenue, Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Safaricom #ticker:SCOM services were disrupted on Sunday following multiple fibre link cuts, affecting millions of customers who use the network.

In a statement, the telecommunication giant said the cuts affected voice and SMS services in Coast and lower eastern regions as well as data unavailability across the network, affecting services operated through the internet.

The outage started at around 10 a.m in the morning, leaving Kenyans in confusion. The services were fully restored at around 2.00 p.m.

“We wish to apologise to our customers that are currently experiencing voice and data outage, caused by multiple fibre link cuts affecting critical transmission equipment,” said Safaricom in a statement.
Safaricom is the country’s largest telecommunication firm controlling over 67 per cent of the market share.

However, recent data by Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) indicates that Airtel gained 2.5 percentage points raising its market share to 19.7 per cent as it signed up new customers and made inroads in voice, data and short message services at the expense of Safaricom and Telkom Kenya.

Safaricom was on the losing end registering a six percentage points drop in its market shares for mobile voice traffic to stand at 66.5 per cent during the quarter. Telkom Kenya’s share of voice traffic dropped by 0.6 percentage points to stand at 4.6 per cent.