Government to punish Safaricom over countrywide Communication breakdown

juma chrispinus

April 24, 2017 4:25 PM

Safaricom goes mteja

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The Communication Authority of Kenya has threatened to punish telecommunication company, Safaricom, following the technical hitch that interfered with communication across the country.

In a press statement, CA Director General Francis Wangusi told journalist that if investigations revealed that Safaricom was responsible for the glitch, then action would be taken against it.

The Monday morning breakdown saw Kenyans unable to access Safaricom’s voice, data, SMS, M-Pesa and enterprise services.

Mr Wangusi divulged that "We are waiting to get an explanation of what happened. We should not have a communication breakdown in the country”.

"If it was a deliberate move, we are going to take action," he mentioned.

The CA director highlighted that telecommunication services should ensure 99.9 percent delivery.

“We cannot tolerate a downtime of more than one hour," Wangusi said.

During the Monday morning communication breakdown, speculations were rife that it was a conspiracy to rig the ongoing nomination primaries.

However, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore released a press statement to calm its customers and assured that the technical team was working to ensure that the systems were restored.

"We wish to notify the public that starting from 9.30 am, we experienced a system outage affecting a number of core services in our network. We have identified the root cause of the outage and are working to resolve this in the shortest time possible."

"In the meantime, voice, data, SMS, M-Pesa and enterprise services will be available intermittently until the issue is fully resolved, Collymore said.

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