Today has not been a good day for Safaricom subscribers. Since morning, Safaricom subscribers experienced an outage of service, ranging from making voice calls to transacting via MPESA and when they wanted to see what people were talking about it online, they couldn’t since data was out too.
The outage is so bad that we are estimating that it is costing the company roughly 23 million per hour and they promptly released a statement to inform its subscribers about the issue.
— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) April 24, 2017
Safaricom confirmed that some of their core services created the outage and it affected voice, data, SMS, MPESA and Enterprise service, which is basically most of the services they offer.
Since the telecommunications company has the majority of subscribers in the country, it has led to people reaching out to Safaricom for a statement as to why they are not able to do certain functions. It also led people to make fun out of the whole situation on Twitter and here are some of them. This has become quite a popular topic on Kenyan Twitter as both Safaricom and MPESA are in the top ten of the trending topics list.
Airtel users watching Safaricom users
https://twitter.com/ODMendel/status/856410367752376320
When you start noticing people
https://twitter.com/RedSabin/status/856422282654363652
We also had a pop culture reference to a doomsday film
https://twitter.com/iam_abeta/status/856447456489463810
We need carrier pigeons
Alas @Safaricom_Care si you guys send me a pigeon, I need to send a text message to someone in Meru.
— Kikuyu Pipes (@DrKanyuira) April 24, 2017
Have you tried switching your base stations off and on?
@Safaricom_Care @SafaricomLtd have you tried switching your base stations off and on?
— Yes I Ken (@KenMacharia_) April 24, 2017
Guys thought it was maybe an intern.
https://twitter.com/Kimanzi_/status/856412733436305408
Some even started having conspiracy theories like:
A random deleting event of a major code line
https://twitter.com/TinyKama/status/856412751887040512
What if…what if…
Relax guys, Safaricom are just rehearsing for the general elections. Services will be restored shortly.
— doctah🎤™ (@doctah254) April 24, 2017
