Thousands of Kenyans woke up today to a second inconvenience layered on top of Wednesday night’s blackout, which knocked out power across Nairobi, the Coast, Mt. Kenya, and parts of the Central Rift.
Attempts to buy Kenya Power prepaid tokens through M-Pesa and other mobile money platforms were failing across the country, leaving prepaid customers stuck even after electricity had technically returned.
The failures began surfacing around 6 AM, hours after Kenya Power had restored supply nationwide.
Customers attempting to top up through mobile money were met with rejections telling them the payment could not go through, one citing a system error and urging them to try a different channel altogether.
READ: Kenya Power To Compensate Customers For Extended Blackouts in Proposed Rules
Some users ran into a less specific error that simply asked them to try again later, without explaining what went wrong. Neither message suggested there were insufficient funds, and several affected customers said they had more than enough money in their mobile wallets.
Instead, the errors pointed to a problem somewhere between the mobile money system and KPLC’s token vending backend.
The timing made the incident feel worse than a routine glitch. The night before, Kenya Power had already been explaining a separate, larger outage.
As reported by Kenyans.co.ke, a technical problem on the national grid caused a blackout that affected Nairobi, the Coast, the Mt. Kenya region, and parts of the Central Rift from around 8:30 PM on Wednesday, July 29.
Restoration ran in phases through the night before supply was fully restored to the rest of the country by today 6 AM.
It is still unclear whether Thursday’s token purchase failures were caused by heavy demand on Kenya Power’s payment systems after the outage or by a separate issue affecting mobile money payments.
By the time this article was published, Kenya Power had not publicly explained the disruption, even as complaints continued to spread online.
READ: Kenya Power Has No Easy Fix for Wrong Token Purchases, and That Is an In-Built Problem
What is clear is how vulnerable prepaid electricity users are when either system fails. A power outage can leave homes without electricity for hours.
Then, even after power is restored, a separate problem with the payment system can prevent customers from buying tokens to recharge their meters, leaving them without electricity for even longer.
