Safaricom apologizes for SMS outage, says services now back to normal

Monday, April 18, 2011…Integrated telecoms firm Safaricom has apologized to its subscribers for an outage that affected its short message service (SMS) for a portion of the day and announced it has since been resolved.

During the disruption, which started being experienced intermittently at around 11.52 am and had been fixed by 15.30 pm, subscribers were unable to send or receive text messages on the network. The outage also affected M-PESA, the money transfer service, which is SMS-based. All services on the M-PESA platform were affected.

The fix means that SMSs sent on the network are now delivered immediately. Even then, there is a backlog occasioned by the outage, which is being cleared as the system attains stability.

"The disruption in normal service was caused by a technical problem triggered by a recent migration to a new system as part of a planned upgrade. We unreservedly apologize to our customers for the inconvenience caused. Our engineers immediately sought a quick-fix, work-around to resolve the issue and we have been successful," said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore.

He assured subscribers that the company would do all within its power to solve the problem and ensure they have a better customer experience in the short and long term on the network.

Monday, April 18, 2011…Integrated telecoms firm Safaricom has apologized to its subscribers for an outage that affected its short message service (SMS) for a portion of the day and announced it has since been resolved.

During the disruption, which started being experienced intermittently at around 11.52 am and had been fixed by 15.30 pm, subscribers were unable to send or receive text messages on the network. The outage also affected M-PESA, the money transfer service, which is SMS-based. All services on the M-PESA platform were affected.

The fix means that SMSs sent on the network are now delivered immediately. Even then, there is a backlog occasioned by the outage, which is being cleared as the system attains stability.

"The disruption in normal service was caused by a technical problem triggered by a recent migration to a new system as part of a planned upgrade. We unreservedly apologize to our customers for the inconvenience caused. Our engineers immediately sought a quick-fix, work-around to resolve the issue and we have been successful," said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore.

He assured subscribers that the company would do all within its power to solve the problem and ensure they have a better customer experience in the short and long term on the network.