Safaricom Home Fibre Down in Some Areas for More than 12 Hours

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Update: Some users are reporting service availability. It, therefore, would seem that the issue is being rectified.

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This is one of the times when some services are not supposed to be offline. However, that is not the case with Safaricom Home Fibre, which has been experiencing downtime since yesterday at 8 PM. Twelve hours later, the product is still unavailable, and according to the carrier, the interruptions are affecting a section of its coverage.

In the first quarter of 2019/2020, Home Fibre was at the top of its game after it ousted Zuku from the number one position as the most used fixed broadband service. This was not the case in the second quarter because Zuku reclaimed its position.

Looking at the two products, Home Fibre is more consistent and generally a better offering, but it is slightly expensive. The recent cases of Coronavirus did not see any price adjustments: instead, Safaricom doubled the speeds, which is still a welcome move.

However, losing a signal for more than 12 hours is a new record for Home Fibre because even previous maintenance services have taken lesser time.

Safaricom has not given us a concrete explanation of what is happening on their end besides the normal ‘the team is working on the issue’ answer.

Another issue that has come up is the manner the carrier handles customer care responses. Yesterday, it took them nearly two hours to get a response. Of course, it is likely that the operator was trying to identify the reason for the downtime – and in previous cases, they would send a text message to apprise customers of service interruption.

Admittedly, the communication part is quite bad, and that is something that the operator has no option but to fix because there have been tens, probably more, of complaints across social media channels. In fact, even the 400 customer care number does not work as advertised because calls are sometimes never picked, or the system assumes you have talked to an agent before dropping the call.

This is not the right time to have an interruption because some people are working from home, and kids need to be entertained during this difficult time.

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Kenn Abuya is a friend of technology, with bias in enterprise and mobile tech. Share your thoughts, tips and hate mail at [email protected]