He says if Safaricom is found culpable for the outage, they will be fined Sh500,000 or 0.20 percent of annual turnover/FILE
NAIROBI, Kenya, Apr 26 – Communications Authority Director General Francis Wangusi has said it has given Safaricom seven days to give a comprehensive report on what exactly caused the outage that saw its services down for almost 10 hours.
Wangusi says MPESA handles over 700 million transactions per hour and this downtime caused a huge loss to the economy.
““The regulator and the government at large oversaw this as a security risk, we are working on a competition study, and in that competition study we are looking at regulatory interventions that we need to make in order to spread some of these risks,” Wangusi said at the launch of the Enterprise ICT Survey.
Wangusi says that the Authority is also looking at interoperability of mobile payment platforms to give consumers options in the event of such outages.
He warns that if Safaricom is found culpable for the outage, the telco will be fined from Sh500, 000 to 0.20 percent of annual turnover.
“The outage also had an impact on other businesses which we have not quantified, but I should think for that period of time, it has a very significant impact on the economic transactions in the country but we would be able to quantify data as we assess the report,” he elaborated.
He adds that the penalty will depend on the impact of the downtime on the economy as well as the measures Safaricom took to correct the situation.
Safaricom has since apologised to their 27.7 million customers and
The Chief Executive Bob Collymore says as caused by two traffic outlets which failed rapidly one after the other.
“I truly appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding as we worked to resolve the issue and sincerely thank you for staying connected to Safaricom,” Collymore explained.
Safaricom extended the apology by allowing customers to send money free of charge for 24 hours from Wednesday midnight.
