Kenya Power have confirmed that customers trying to buy electricity tokens via M-Pesa are currently unable to do so. The problem which has persisted for over 5 hours is related to a technical issue experienced by Safaricom’s Mobile Money platform.
“We experienced service intermittency with PayBill payments that resulted in some transactions not being completed on M-PESA.” Read part of Kenya Power’s statement.
The power company advised it’s customers to use alternative digital payment platforms including Equitel, Airtel Money and KCB Bank. It is worth noting that purchase of Kenya Power Tokens via Airtel money comes at no extra charge.
Even more frustrating for Kenya Power customers, KPLC statement was released 3 hours after Safaricom had claimed issues facing Mpesa had been resolved.
Earlier Safaricom had said, “The technical issue has since been resolved and we continue to monitor the services closely. “
However, the service outage that resulted in some transactions not being completed on M-PESA persisted. Those grossly affected especially in the night time were KPLC customers reliant on M-pesa prompting the power company to issue a statement.
Second M-Pesa Downtime in 2024
M-Pesa downtime is affecting other services and third party apps. For example, NCBA Loop clients do not have the M-pesa option active. loop response to a query was: “Please note that the feature will be available after the downtime with the mobile money service provider is resolved. We truly regret the inconvenience you might”
This is the second major M-pesa outage to occur in less than a month.
