Safaricom may be fined up to 0.1 per cent of its gross annual turnover for poor quality of service after its network failed yesterday.
The network outage began at about 9.40 a.m. and persisted till 4.30 p.m. and the cause was yet to be made public by close of the day.
Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore said, “Our engineers identified the root cause of the outage, which was a failure on both our core network as well as our redundancy options. Our team worked as quickly as possible to resolve the issue and invoked our business continuity planning protocol to restore services and the incident was marked as closed at 4.30pm.”
However, according to Communication Authority chief Francis Wangusi, all telecommunication services should guarantee a 99.9 per cent delivery. “We cannot tolerate a downtime of more than one hour,” he said.
Safaricom is estimated to have lost at least Sh. 2.6 billion M-Pesa transactions during the six-hour outage whose ripple effects on the economy are expected to be huge.
