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Kenya's Safaricom under pressure after 3-hour nationwide network outage

Kenya's Safaricom under pressure after 3-hour nationwide network outage

Kenya

Kenya’s biggest mobile network operator, Safaricom has been called to answer for the three-hour nationwide outage on Monday morning that affected phone calls, data, SMS and other financial services.

The East African country’s communication authority said a communication breakdown of over an hour is intolerable, and Safaricom has been summoned to explain the blackout for an action to be taken. “We are waiting to get an explanation of what happened. We should not have a communication breakdown in the country. If it was a deliberate move, we are going to take action,” head of the authority, Francis Wangusi told local media.

Safaricom, which has 27.7 million subscribers, explained in an earlier statement that they suffered a technical issue and their services will be are being restored.

“We have identified the root cause of the outage and are working to resolve this in the shortest time possible. In the meantime, Voice, Data, SMS, M-PESA and Enterprise services will be available intermittently until the issue is fully resolved,” the company said.

The outage, which has been resolved, started at 9:30 local time (0630 GMT) and millions of people were affected.

.bobcollymore Update pic.twitter.com/dLur7zQQT6

— Safaricom Limited (SafaricomLtd) April 24, 2017

.bobcollymore We have identified the root cause of the outage and are working to resolve this in the shortest time possible. pic.twitter.com/1ItendcDup

— Safaricom Limited (SafaricomLtd) April 24, 2017

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