Millions of Safaricom customers were for hours yesterday left without internet services following a national blackout.
The provider’s internet service on both wireless and mobile broadband was off from around 9am to early afternoon leaving customers without connection to various voice and data services .
The company that commands more than 75 per cent of the country’s mobile network blamed multiple fibre link cuts for the blackout.
“We wish to apologise to our cutomers and partners that we are currently experiencing voice and data outage caused by multiple fibre link cuts affecting critical transmission equipment,” Safaricom said in a statement but assured clients that they were working to restore services.
Those in the Coast region and lower Eastern could not access voice and SMS services.
Users in other parts of the country were however able to send and receive money on the M-pesa platform, and text message services were also working well.
“I needed to send some emails but could not send. Initially, I thought my phone settings had problems because internet access just shut down abruptly,” said a marketer in Nairobi, who blamed the provider for poor quality of service.
“The Communications Authority should be notified of this,” he said.
The official statement was met with criticism from users who claimed a refund of their money and extension of hours for un-used and expired bundles. Others threatened to migrate to other networks.
Other users took to social media platforms to vent their frustration, after recent reports of customers’ lines being swapped by fraudsters raised a storm for the company, with customers wondering how such high level fraud happened from within the mobile service provicer.
“No Safaricom network, is my line being swapped? Safaricom PLC mko wapi?” asked a Facebook user @Raphael Mutili.
On Saturday, police arrested a Safaricom employee and a Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology student over the sim-swapping scandal, nabbing over 2,000 un-used Safaricom simcards, five till agent numbers, 44 used sim cards, an internet router, three M-pesa record books and mobile phones.
Safaricom is the major mobile service provider in Kenya, with at least 26 million subscribers on its network.
Last year in April, a similar mishap lasting two hours occasioned a countrywide blackout of the provider’s services, in what the CEO termed an unusual technical hitch, which caused a failure in both core network and redundant path.