On Monday this week, Kenya’s telecom company; Safaricom suffered a major network outage that left many Safaricom customers devastated, when they couldn’t make calls, send money, buy data, as the company claimed it had experienced a technical hitch. However, many believed that it might have been hacked.
On Wednesday, according to reports by Capital FM in Kenya, Communications Authority (CA) Director General Francis Wangusi is said to have given Safaricom seven (7) days to give a comprehensive report on what exactly caused the outage that saw its services down for almost 10 hours.
Wangusi says MPESA handles over 700 million transactions per hour and this downtime caused a huge loss to the economy, Capital FM reports.
“The regulator and the government at large oversaw this as a security risk, we are working on a competition study, and in that competition study we are looking at regulatory interventions that we need to make in order to spread some of these risks,” Wangusi said.
Capital FM Kenya continued to report that Wangusi warned the teleco if found culpable for the outage will be fined from 500, 000 Kenyan Shillings (roughly 17.6 million UGX) to 0.20% of annual turnover. He added that the penalty will depend on the impact of the downtime on the economy as well as the measures Safaricom took to correct the situation.
Safaricom CEO; Bob Collymore came out to say that they outage was caused by two traffic outlets which failed rapidly one after the other.
While in other news, Safaricom is said to have given M-Pesa users 24 hours of free mobile money transfers as a balm for the inconvenience and losses suffered over the two days
