Kenya’s telecommunication giant Safaricom has given M-Pesa users 24 hours of free mobile money transfers in a move to atone for inconveniences caused on Monday when its network developed a technical glitch.
The firm’s CEO Bob Collymore said the move was to make up for the losses and inconveniences suffered by its customers.
To sensitize its customers about the make-up offer, the company sent text messages to M-Pesa users to notify them.
“Dear Customer,” read the text from Safaricom, “thank you for choosing Safaricom. In appreciation, sending money with M-PESA will be free today 26-04-2017 starting 12:00am to 11:59pm.”
The technical hitch affected voice calls, SMS, internet connectivity, M-pesa and other entrepreneurial services offered by the company.
The whole country was on a downtime due to the hitch. The firm admitted to having suffered a network outage in the whole country due to a technical glitch at around 9:30 am Monday morning and lasted for three hours.
“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,” read statement from the firm adding that, “We have identified the root cause of the outage and are working to resolve this in the shortest time possible.”
Communication Authority of Kenya (CA) threatened to take action on the firm over the network outage.
As a result of the network outage on Monday and poor M-Pesa services for the better part of Tuesday morning, the firm’s share at the Nairobi Securities Exchange lost ground marginally, closing at Sh18.95 on Tuesday from Sh19.10 the previous day, meaning that the telecom firm shed Sh6 billion of market capitalization according to Daily Nation.