M-pesa service will be unavailable this Saturday on a scheduled maintenance. The maintenance is set to take 9 hours starting 11pm Saturday March 21, 2015 to 8am Sunday March 22, 2015. Throughout the period subscribers will not access any Safaricom services including Deposit, transfers (send money), withdrawals (agent and ATM), lipa na M-Pesa (pay bill and buy goods), M-Pesa, M-Pesa balance enquiry, bank to M-Pesa and M-Pesa to bank, all M-Shwari, KCB M-Pesa and M-Kesho services for customers with an account, buying airtime and International Money Transfer (IMT).
The Schedule maintenance is seen as a part of the relocation of M-pesa servers from Germany to Kenya which is scheduled to complete in April after 18 months. The relocation of the servers was set to offer Safaricom increased up time and reduction as well as save on maintenance costs. The relocation also offers Safaricom a better chance to capture the growing payments market segment.
M-pesa which was launched in 2007 boasts of nearly 20 million subscribers and 66.7 per cent share of the money market. It has over 85,000 M-Pesa agents.
