Mpesa Outage: Safaricom’s mobile money transfer service, M-Pesa is currently unavailable. The service suffered an outage from 6pm on Thursday evening.
Safaricom in a statement has said that it is currently working to restore the service. The money transfer service was restored after two hours.
“We have restored all M-Pesa services following an outage that occurred 1805hrs,” the Safaricom said.
In 2018, Safaricom was hit with Mpesa outage in two different occasions. Yesterday’s breakdown also affected the fast-rising Fuliza service by Safaricom. Fuliza is targeted at all Safaricom M-PESA customers that have been active for at least the past 6 months and maintain a good M-Shwari credit performance history.
Safaricom launched the overdraft facility in partnership with KCB and CBA. The two banks use algorithms based on transactions such as M-Pesa deals and airtime use to set a limit on amount which can be accessed by individual customers. Fuliza allows users can get overdrafts as high as Sh. 50,000 depending on the value of their transactions and the interest rate on your overdraft is 0.5% per day on the outstanding balance.
M-Pesa was launched more than a decade ago to offer Kenyans without bank accounts a network to transfer cash via mobile phone.
It now offers a range of payment services, loans and savings to more than 21 million people in Kenya and has been copied abroad.
Safaricom, Kenya’s largest operator that is partly owned by South Africa’s Vodacom and Britain’s Vodafone, said the deal was part of an effort to transform M-Pesa into a global payments platform. M-Pesa has become a major profit driver for Safaricom. in its latest results, Safaricom announced a record net profit of Sh. 63.4 billion. This came as the company posted a profit growth of 14.7 per cent in the year ended March 2019. Revenue from M-Pesa grew by 19.2 per cent to Sh. 74.9 billion.
Revenue was driven largely by M-Pesa, which grew by 19 per cent and accounted for 75 per cent of the growth in 2018. Now, M-Pesa accounts for 51 per cent of Safaricom’s service revenue. In the same vein, M-Pesa subscribers grew by 19.2 per cent from 16.6 million to 22.6 million.