Update: Both Kenya and Rwanda have tweeted that services have been restored.
Equity Bank has told customers in Kenya and Rwanda that its services are failing on Thursday morning, 1st October 2026. At 8:58 am, Equity Bank Kenya said it was “experiencing an intermittent service downtime affecting all our services” and that its technical team was working to restore them. Intermittent means the services are failing on and off. Six minutes earlier, Equity Bank Rwanda PLC, the group’s Rwandan arm, had posted its own notice in English and Kinyarwanda, saying a technical issue had affected “some banking services”.
What customers want to know is which services are down, why, and until when. The notices answer none of it. Kenya says all services, Rwanda says some. Neither gives a cause, a list of affected channels or a time for recovery, and neither says what happens to a transfer or withdrawal that failed halfway. Equity has also not said whether the two outages are linked, although the notices appeared within minutes of each other.
The only explanation so far is an unverified post on X at 10:59 am, which says the outage follows a Checkpoint Firewall failure at Equity’s primary data centre and is hitting ATMs, mobile banking, PesaLink, card services, USSD and mobile money transfers. The post names no source and Equity has not confirmed it, so it stays a claim. A firewall is the gate that inspects the traffic entering and leaving a network, and the primary data centre is the site where a bank’s core systems run. If the main firewall there stops passing traffic, everything that depends on those systems, from ATMs to the USSD menu (Equity’s *247# opened to all networks almost five years ago), can fail together. That would be consistent with a bank saying “all our services”, but it is our reading, not Equity’s.
Equity had warned customers the day before, at 2:34 pm on 30th September, that planned system maintenance would make all its services intermittently unavailable from 1:00 am to 1:30 am on Thursday 1st October. The outage notices came more than seven hours after that window was due to end. Equity has not said whether the maintenance and the outage are connected.
Both Kenyan notices end with the same fraud warning. Equity says it calls customers from only one number, 0763 000 000, and will never ask for bank details, a PIN, a password, an OTP (the one-time code sent to confirm a transaction) or card information by phone or SMS. The Rwandan notice carries no such line.
A bank that is down in two countries at once, with its only public explanation coming from an unsourced post, owes customers a plain statement of what failed and when it will be fixed. We will update this piece when Equity gives a cause or confirms that services are back.
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