M-Pesa Downtime: Safaricom Announces Maintenance Schedule

Safaricom M-Pesa users have been put on notice of service disruption due to scheduled maintenance on the popular mobile money exchange platform.

The scheduled maintenance will occur on Thursday 18 June between midnight and 5am local time.

“During the maintenance, all M-Pesa services including purchasing of airtime shall be temporarily unavailable,” the statement read in part.

This will further disrupt other processes on the platform such as sending money and paying bills on Paybill and Buy Goods and Services options.

M-Pesa Profit Jump

The giant telco posted a 19.5 per cent jump in full-year profits to Ksh.74.7 billion in April 2020, with revenues being spurred on by the company’s acquisition of the M-Pesa mobile money platform from Vodafone.

M-Pesa derived revenues grew by 12 .6 per cent to Ksh.84.4 billion in spite of the revenue stream taking a hit of Ksh.1.9 billion from the withdrawal of revenues from betting in late 2019.

During the Covid 19 pandemic season, the telco made public that its customers donated 1 Billion Bonga Points equivalent to Ksh 330 million through the months of April and May under its Bonga For Good initiative.