Yesterday, Airtel suffered a day long service outage which affected their over 12 million subscribers.
According to Business Daily, the network is now risking being punished by the telecosm regulator due to this outage.
“The authority has already commenced its investigations into the matter and is awaiting a detailed account of the cause of the downtime,” the Communications Authority of Kenya told Business Daily.
“The authority has already commenced its investigations into the matter and is awaiting a detailed account of the cause of the downtime,” they said. “It should be noted that however, it is upon considering multiple factors based on the findings of an investigation that the authority decides how much a penalty should be or even whether a fine should be applied to all,” they continued.
Airtel Kenya admitted to the network interruption yesterday but they did not specify its exact cause that affected millions of Kenyans yesterday. They advised their subscribers to switch to 2G for calls and texts.
The law provides if an operator is found in violation of network outage, it would pay a penalty of upto 0.2% of their gross turnover. This means if found liable, they could pay a fine that would run into the millions.
This is not the first time we have seen a countrywide outage from a local network operator. Over two years ago, Safaricom experienced a countrywide network outage that affected their core services like MPESA, SMS and Enterprise services. However, they were found out that they couldn’t have prevented the outage which exonerated them from any form of liability hence escaping a huge penalty.
