Airtel Kenya cut me off from my number and my money, and it has done it before

On Friday 7 August, Airtel Kenya subscribers filled social media with the same complaint: no signal. Outage tracker down.co.ke recorded a spike in reports from around 11am, peaking at about 1pm, with users mostly reporting “No Signal” and network connection problems. I saw numerous complaints that day on Twitter. Airtel Kenya did not publish any official explanation of what happened that day.

That was the same week Airtel Kenya was celebrating. The company announced it had secured a 25-year operating licence from the Communications Authority of Kenya, ending a licensing dispute that goes back to 2015. “I am pleased to tell you that we have successfully renewed our licence for another 25 years,” managing director Djibril Tobe said, per Business Daily, adding that the approval “assures us that we are here to stay.”

So what the hell is happening to my SIM Card?

No Network

First of all, I am an Airtel Premier customer.

From yesterday night, my Airtel SIM card stopped registering on the network. The phone shows “Emergency calls only”. In SIM settings, the line sits there with its number displayed, toggled on, set to search across 5G, 4G, 3G and 2G. It finds nothing. No calls in, no calls out, no SMS, no mobile data.

This is a number I have held for many years. It is registered. It has money on it. Over Wi-Fi, the Airtel app still loads my account and shows KES 450.52 in airtime and a 230.71 MB data balance.

But it’s actually worse. While writing this, the Airtel Money section of the app started returning an error: “Airtel Money Services are currently unavailable, please try again later.” A few hours earlier I could still see my wallet balance through the app even with the no-network SIM. Now I cannot.

Whether that is my account specifically or a wider Airtel Money outage, I cannot tell, because the usual fallback for checking is dialling *334#, and dialling anything requires a network I no longer have. I have a balance I can no longer access.

But we’ve been here before, argh!

This is the second time Airtel has done this to me. In March 2017, the same line dropped off the network with no warning, and I documented the whole ordeal: days of tweets without answers, a shop visit, replacement SIM cards that would not activate, and Bharti Airtel’s India account stepping in on Twitter because the Kenyan operation could not resolve its own customer’s problem. That episode only ended with a SIM replacement. Nine years later the exact failure has repeated itself.

In a Communications Authority consumer survey reported by the Daily Nation in December 2025, Airtel callers were the worst hit by outages of any Kenyan operator, with 19.4 percent experiencing more than five dropped calls per 100 made. The same report notes the regulator had warned Airtel over poor network services a year earlier and ordered it to improve coverage.

The questions Airtel Kenya needs to answer

I want Airtel to explain:

• What happened on 7 August, and is my SIM card issue connected to it?
• What causes a registered, funded, years-old SIM to fall off the network entirely?
• Why is Airtel Money unreachable through the app, which works over Wi-Fi and should not depend on my SIM having signal?
• What happens to the money in a wallet, and the airtime and bundles on a line, while the customer is locked out through no fault of their own?
• How is a Premier customer whose only Airtel line is dead supposed to reach Airtel?

Will I be compensated according to the Kenya Information and Communication Regulations?

Airtel has also just committed to Kenya for 25 more years, with plans that lean heavily on Airtel Money. We covered where Airtel Money Kenya stands right now, with more than five million customers and no managing director since Anne Kinuthia-Otieno left in July. Those five million people are being asked to trust this wallet with their money. Tonight I can see why that trust is fragile. Money in a wallet you cannot open is not money you have.

If Airtel responds with an actual explanation, we will publish it. Until then, if Airtel is your only line, or worse, your only wallet, you must be pretty annoyed. I am.