Why You Will have Trouble Accessing M-Pesa This Weekend

Giant telecommunication Company Safaricom has warned M-Pesa users across the country that there will be an outage of the service for at least four hours on Sunday.

Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore stated that contrary to previous information that the mobile money service would be unavailable for 11 hours due to an upgrade operation, the time had been cut to only four hours.

"M-Pesa services will only be unavailable for four hours starting Sunday, July 16 from 12am to 4 am," Mr Collymore informed customers.

"We expect all services to be restored and M-Pesa to be fully functional following the process. We thank our customers for their continued support during this upgrade," he added.

Safaricom initiated the three-week system upgrade on June 30 which saw M-Pesa services disrupted ocassionally.

According to the telecommunication company, the upgrade is geared towards adding new features and automating some functions to reduce the need for customers to make a request at its call centres.

It will also reduce the time new partners take to be integrated onto the M-Pesa system from weeks to a few hours and also see M-Shwari and KCB M-Pesa integrated into the Safaricom App.

Mr Collymore mentioned: "This upgrade paves the way for the next phase of M-Pesa and will enable the service delivers, even more, value for our customers and partners".