NAIROBI, Kenya Oct 28 – Safaricom suffered a total collapse of its M-PESA service following a power outage on a Vodafone server in Germany on Saturday night, which damaged server discs.
The company’s Chief Executive Officer Bob Collymore issued a statement in which he assured subscribers that money held in the M-PESA system was safe despite the network crash.
“Our technical teams both here and in Germany are working to restore normal services as soon as possible,” he said in a statement released on Sunday.
Collymore expressed regret at the anxiety caused and requested for patience from customers.
“We are optimistic that our technical teams will restore normal service by end of day. We would like to assure our customers that their funds remain safe. We appeal for patience during this time and regret the inconvenience caused.”
The outage prevented M-PESA customers from sending money, depositing and withdrawals, ATM withdrawals, buying airtime, bank to M-PESA, paying bills and buying goods or conducting web transactions.
The operator has suffered technical problems with the M-PESA service before in recent months.
Service was disrupted during a systems upgrade in April and from another cable break the operator suffered at the end of last year.
