No software is perfect. They usually exhibit strange bugs from time to time where some are catastrophic while others are hilarious. Well today, one of Safaricom apps is exhibiting a strange bug and we don’t know why.
MySafaricom is one of my most used apps of 2019 and I use it to access a lot of Safaricom services. However today, I fired it up and it displayed this strange message.
The bug, which I call it the New Years Eve Birthday Wish bug (long name, I know) wishes you a Happy Birthday. This is strange since today is not my birthday so it is weird to see that message from Safaricom.
I thought I was alone at first, then a friend replied to my tweet showing the weird bug and she got the same message too.
Got the same this morning! pic.twitter.com/1Wf1OwEzki
— Miss Okal (@JuneOkal) December 31, 2019
Safaricom has data about our birthdays and they use that data to place us in different tarrifs (like Blaze) or to give us free 1GB data on our birthdays. I checked whether I got free data (since they do give free data on your birthday) and to no surprise, I didn’t get it.
The bug timing is also quite strange and reminiscent of the Y2K bug in 1999. The Y2K bug threatened computer systems since at the time programs represented 4 digit years with their final two digits and the impending new year meant that the year 2000 would be displayed as ’00’ which is indistinguishable from the year 1900. This birthday bug is obviously not of this nature and scale but the timing is suspect.
MySafaricom app netted one million downloads within the first year of its existence back in 2017 so you can expect millions of Kenyans out there got this weird message today.
