Safaricom has announced plans to suspend its M-Pesa services for 15 hour this coming weekend for a system upgrade.
In a statement, Safaricom Chief Executive Officer Mr Bob Colymore said that all M-Pesa services will be affected, but will be restored back on Sunday at 1pm, which will cause hiccups to more than 26 million customers who use the service in Kenya and more than seven million in Tanzania.
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“We are on a journey to continue to enrich your M-PESA experience. This is why we shall be upgrading our system starting Saturday 9th September 2017 at 10pm and will complete on Sunday 10th September 2017 at 1pm. During this period, all Mpesa services will remain unavailable,” stated Colymore.
The CEO has, however, not divulged any details of the upgrade. This becomes the fourth major upgrade since M-Pesa’s launch ten years ago, and the second such upgrade since Safaricom migrated the platform to Kenya in 2015.
A similar upgrade lasted two hours in January this year, whereas a mid-July, changeover to a new platform resulted in a 12-hour outage, with this weekend’s interruption’s taking the longest in the history of M-Pesa.
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M-Pesa is the largest mobile money provider which was launched in 2007, clocking a decade since its inception operating in Kenya and Tanzania. It has however spread across the globe to Afghanistan, South Africa, India and in 2014 to Romania and in 2015 to Albania. M-Pesa expanded into Mozambique, Lesotho, and Egypt.
Services that will be affected will be Lipa na M-Pesa, online betting sites that allow payments through M-Pesa, KCB-MPesa and M-Shwari, among others.
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