The Peter Ndegwa-led Safaricom has once again trended for bad reasons, this time round being Mpesa services outage.
Millions of Kenyans woke up to a rude shock on Monday, September 22, 2025, when Safaricom’s mobile money platform failed during the early morning rush.
Commuters, matatu operators, and workers heading to offices were left stranded, with many unable to pay fares or transact in shops and fuel stations.
The company had earlier issued a notice last week, informing customers that a system upgrade would affect M-Pesa services between 12:30 am and 3:30 am.
However, instead of restoring the service as promised, the outage dragged into peak commuting hours, leaving frustrated Kenyans questioning Safaricom’s planning and preparedness.
In modern ICT, outages of this scale are unacceptable. Industry best practice dictates that mission-critical systems like M-Pesa should be designed with fault tolerance, a principle that ensures users remain unaffected even when parts of the system fail.
Backup servers, redundancy, and failover mechanisms are standard across the world’s leading financial platforms. The fact that M-Pesa, which handles billions of shillings in transactions daily, can grind to a halt exposes a glaring weakness in Safaricom’s infrastructure strategy.
Critics argue that Safaricom has grown complacent, focusing on profit margins rather than customer experience. For years, Kenyans have been told M-Pesa is “reliable,” yet every major outage proves otherwise.
Planning, planning, planning, that is where the buck stops. A system upgrade should never extend into the morning rush. The company’s IT managers ought to schedule such maintenance with clear contingencies to protect customers.
For a telco that prides itself on innovation, today’s chaos was nothing short of embarrassing. Small businesses lost sales, travelers missed appointments, and drivers wasted valuable time arguing with passengers who couldn’t pay via M-Pesa. The ripple effect on the economy was real and immediate.
Safaricom must be reminded that M-Pesa is not just a product, it is the backbone of Kenya’s financial system. With great power comes greater responsibility. The least Kenyans deserve is a mobile money service that works when they need it most.
