Today, Safaricom had a rare network glitch that affected a number of their customers in Nairobi which rendered them unable to access their services.
It appears the fault was detected at 7:56pm at their Nairobi Gospel Mobile Switch Room (MSR) due to high temperatures at the site. This fault was labelled as critical and it rendered all services inaccessible to a number of Nairobians, which include mobile voice, mobile data, home fiber and SMS.
The network fault affected a large section of the Nairobi metropolis which includes Nairobi East and West. These sections include Kireita, Ngara, CBD, Racecourse, Kawangware, Kangemi, Loresho, Dagoretti, Mountain View, Pumwani, Kamkunji, Ongata Rongai, Kiserian, Karen, Kibera, Wilson, Ngong Hill and Langata. If you live within this region or happened to be within these regions, you might have experienced the fault.
Such a network fault could be very costly to people out there. People rely on Safaricom services to make important calls, surf the web, chat with friends on social networking sites, hail a cab, stream content on Netflix and even make payments on MPESA. Cutting off people would be disastrous, especially if they don’t have a backup SIM on their phone.
I’m part of the populace that was affected by this outage and it is back in my end. However, it might not be back on your end, but Safaricom is hard on restoring this so that the services are restored to everyone affected. So yes to the people asking, no your phone is okay, so you can stop restarting your phone if you can’t connect to the network.
