Safaricom-owned Mpesa has gone offline leaving transactions hanging in Nairobi CBD and across the country.

On January 9th, 2024 between 10 am-11 am Safaricoms’ Mpesa started experiencing delays on feedback and transactions.

By 11 am the largest mobile money service in East and Central Africa went offline with transactions grinding to a halt.

Safaricom Mpesa is an all-round mobile money platform with a record of carrying out an average of 10.3 million transactions daily.

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Mpesa error messages

With students resuming school this week for the first term of the year, students and parents were stranded in bus terminals and supermarkets over an unresponsive Mpesa.

The messaging by Mpesa to its customers has seen a range of changes in less than an hour of its malfunctioning.

Mpesa started with Delayed response messages with a 10-minute interval window on retrial.

According to Mpesa “MPESA is experiencing delays, and is not able to accept your request. Please wait for 10 minutes before trying again.”

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Additionally, Mpesa seemed to have dipped under and ent offline sharing responses on invalid requests.

“The parameters of data sources are null null” shared Mpesa to its customers minutes after sharing messages on delayed requests.

Consequently, Mpesa reverted to the current response on maintenance after experiencing delays.

In its latest response it shared “Dear customer, MPESA is currently undergoing maintenance and is unable to process your request. We apologise for the inconvenience”

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According to M-Pesa agents in Nairobi CBD, they are yet to receive official communication on the way forward other than the generated responses from M-Pesa.

One shared that business is at a standstill as they wait for systems to get back online.

Another agent shared that, with Mpesa unresponsive, some customers opted for USSD codes which would work for some but severely impacted the majority.

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Kenyans make fun of M-Pesa

In the spirit of no dull day in Kenya, Kenyans were fast to reach out online making merry of the situation.

Kenyans made fun of different scenarios in which passengers were caught up as they went through their day-to-day activities.

Mpesa has however not issued a public statement on what has stopped businesses in their tracks across the country and in the region.

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