A technical issue facing M-PESA Paybill is still affecting transactions this morning. This was confirmed by Safaricom and comes 12 hours after the company had claimed the issue had been resolved.
“We are experiencing a recurring service intermittency affecting some PayBill payments. The issue is under resolution by our technical team, we shall inform you once normal services resume.” Says , Safaricom.
Last evening, M-pesa customers using the Paybill feature and other 3rd party services reliant on M-Pesa began experiencing issues. A notice to customers from the telco at 8pm last night stated that the issue had been resolved.
However, this appeared not be the case for some, especially those trying to buy electricity tokens via M-Pesa. 3 hours after Safaricom’s notice, the Kenya Power issued it’s own statement advising customers to use alternative digital channels to purchase electricity.
NCBA Loop also confirmed that M-pesa is unavailable on its digital platform due to technical issues. Later in the night, some customers had reprieve as the stalled transactions via M-Pesa Paybill were fulfilled. However, this was not the case for everyone indicating the matter was yet to be fully resolved.
M-Pesa currently holds over 96% of Kenya’s mobile money market and any challenges it faces affects millions of Kenyans. In addition, the M-Pesa API ecosystem has over 70000 developers meaning many 3rd party services are reliant on M-Pesa.
Safaricom’s Quality of Service
According to Kenya’s Communications Authority (CA) Safaricom’s end-to-end QoS performance, which measures communication services’ overall quality and reliability, dropped from 95.68% in 2020/2021 to 95% in 2021/2022. In 2023, this number dropped to 87.60%. This was the third year in a row Safaricom’s QoS dropped. Perhaps, a sign overall quality of service at Safaricom has been dropping.
