You may not have noticed, but MPESA has been having outages in the last two weeks. The outages have been scheduled to happen intermittently to allow for a major MPESA upgrade to take place within the period. The MPESA upgrade is the third major one in the 10 years MPESA has been in service, and this third one is intended to allow for MPESA users to experience even better and faster MPESA services. The scheduled MPESA outage that will take place on Saturday was initially meant to last 11 hours, but has since been re-planned to happen for four hours only after the upgrade processes have been optimized.
In this third upgrade of MPESA, the first outage happened in June 30th, then a second happened on July 5th. These initial outages were hardly noticed by majority of MPESA customers, as they were done between 1AM and 4AM when almost everyone was either asleep or were not in need of MPESA services. The third MPESA outage in the ongoing upgrade could have affected everyone due to the initial 11 hours planned outage that was to start at 7PM, but the re-planning to four hours should sound music to many who could have been adversely affected.
“Contrary to the earlier announced outage period, M-Pesa services will only be unavailable for four hours starting Sunday July 16 from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. We expect all services to be restored and M-Pesa to be fully functional following the process. We thank our customers for their continued support during this update”, said Bob Collymore in a notice to customers.
So far, the ongoing upgrade has seen a relaunch of of the BLAZE Shake functionality in the Safaricom App, and also the featuring of Flex Services in the same App. The final upgrade is geared to lessen the time it takes for partners to integrate to MPESA from weeks to a few hours, and also to introduce Mshwari and KCB-MPESA into the Safaricom App. Right now if you go to Safaricom App and try to access the Loans Services, you’ll be greeted with a “coming soon” message.