Safaricom’s mobile payment platform M-Pesa is currently experiencing significant delays in sending out confirmation messages after transactions, causing inconvenience to millions of users both on the business and consumer fronts. Despite transactions being seemingly processed, the delays in receiving confirmation messages are creating uncertainty and operational challenges.
This issue is particularly problematic because these confirmation messages are crucial for the verification of transactions – think of matatus, mama mboga, tiny shops, supermarkets etc. Many businesses and individual customers rely on these notifications to confirm the receipt of funds or the success of a payment, thus ensuring the smooth operation of commerce and personal transactions across Kenya.
As of writing, Safaricom has not issued an official statement regarding the delay in notifications.
This year has already seen multiple outages affecting M-Pesa services, possibly pointing to broader challenges within Safaricom’s infrastructure. While the current situation is not classified as an outage since transactions are still being processed, it nonetheless adds to the frustrations of users who depend on M-Pesa’s normally reliable service.
Adding to the woes, in the past few hours there’ve also been reports of users not being able to access Mali Investment feature that allows Kenyans to invest money and earn interest. There have also been reports of random errors with customers receiving a message stating “message could not be sent.”
These technical issues are not only causing immediate inconvenience but may also have longer-term impacts on customer trust and business operations that rely on Safaricom’s platforms. The lack of communication from Safaricom about these problems only exacerbates the situation, leaving many to wonder when a resolution will be forthcoming.
