Kenyans continue to face issues with M-Pesa Paybill transactions Tuesday morning as technical problems persist. This comes 12 hours after Safaricom claimed the matter was resolved.
In an updated statement on X, the mobile network operator said: “We are experiencing a recurring service intermittency affecting some PayBill payments. The issue is under resolution by our technical team. We will inform customers once normal services fully resume.”
The failures first emerged Monday evening, negatively impacting customers utilizing the Paybill capability within M-Pesa as well as various third-party services reliant upon M-Pesa for payments. At approximately 8 p.m. local time, Safaricom released a notice stating engineers had addressed the problem.
However, numerous M-Pesa subscribers found this inaccurate when trying to purchase electricity tokens overnight.
NCBA Loop additionally confirmed via social media that M-Pesa remained unavailable across its platform during this period.
While a subset of delayed Paybill transfers did ultimately go through later that night, the problem seems far from resolved for many Kenyans.
Second Major M-Pesa Outage Within One Month
Notably, this represents the second major M-Pesa failure within the span of January 2024 alone. Earlier interruptions occurred on January 9th, preventing millions of daily users from successfully conducting vital money transfers or digital payments.
Customers attempting transactions that day faced persistent error messages. Safaricom advised retrying after 10 minutes, indicating potential intermittent service degradation was occurring behind the scenes.
With over 96% market share in Kenya, instability affecting the uber-popular M-Pesa mobile payments app has an outsized impact nationwide.
On top of that, the extensive M-Pesa API ecosystem now includes over 70,000 participating developers crafting complementary apps and services.
Potentially Declining Network Service Quality to Blame?
According to stats published by the Communications Authority of Kenya responsible for oversight, Safaricom’s end-to-end quality of service (QoS) declined from 95.68% in 2020/2021 to 95% in 2021/2022. Most recently, in 2023, the figure dropped further to 87.60%, marking three straight years of deterioration.
This downward annual trend hints at the potential for slipping reliability across Safaricom’s overall communications infrastructure, including M-Pesa’s foundational layers. With the proper functioning of M-Pesa integral to essentially all facets of daily life for most Kenyans at this point, resolving these recurring technical failings is now key.
To that end, Safaricom must transparently pinpoint the foremost root cause(s) contributing to this month’s M-Pesa outages.
Proactively preventing future platform-wide interruptions is equally essential. More proactive and forthcoming root cause analysis paired with improved remediation communication will prove vital should Kenya’s widespread payment backbone falter again.
