Safaricom has announced a nationwide outage of M-Pesa services,, which is set to affect millions of customers.
In a statement on Saturday, March 22, 2025, the giant telecommunications company revealed that the nationwide outage will last for thirty minutes.
“Dear Customer, we are continuously innovating and enhancing our services to connect our customers with endless possibilities. To meet our promise to always offer a reliable, safe, secure, and superior customer experience, we will be conducting a scheduled system maintenance on the night of Monday, 24th March 2025, starting from 01:00 am to 01:30 am,” Safaricom stated.
Intermittent services
The mobile service provider equally noted that during the entire time of the outage, Safaricom M-pesa services will be intermittent while other services, including calls and SMSs, will be available.
“During the 30-minute maintenance period, all M-Pesa services will be intermittent. All other Safaricom services, including calls, data, and SMS services, will be available uninterrupted,” the statement read.
The company apologized for causing inconveniences to the over 30 million monthly active users of the payment and money transfer service.
“The timing of this maintenance has been planned to result in the least inconvenience to our customers. We apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for choosing us as your trusted provider,” Safaricom said.
Previous outages
In 2024, Safaricom announced a scheduled M-Pesa outage that ran from Tuesday, September 10, 2024, at 11:00 pm to Wednesday, September 11, 2024, at 3:30 am.
“To enable us to continue to give you the best M-Pesa experience, we have scheduled a system maintenance on Tuesday, 10th September 2024, from 11:00 PM to Wednesday, 11th September, 3:30 AM,” Safaricom noted then.
This came just a month after a similar system maintenance, which saw Kenyans experience an M-Pesa outage on the night of Sunday, August 11, 2024.
M-Pesa has over 660,000 active agents across at least eight countries in Africa, serving over 60 million users of the mobile payment system.
Among the countries with M-Pesa in Africa are Tanzania, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Egypt, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, and Kenya.
Apart from being a preferred payment system for the banked and unbanked customers, M-Pesa also provides financial services to millions of people who have mobile phones but do not have bank accounts or only have limited access to banking services.
