Safaricom has suffered a voice and data outage affecting critical transmission equipment because of a damaged fibre link, Kenya's biggest telecoms company said on Sunday.
Safaricom, which is 35 percent owned by South Africa's Vodacom, controls nearly 70 percent of Kenya's mobile market, with close to 30 million subscribers.
The outage "has resulted in loss of voice and SMS services in coast and lower eastern regions, as well as general data unavailability across the network, affecting services operated through the internet," the company said in a statement. "We are working to restore the services as soon as possible."
The company also runs the mobile money platform M-Pesa, which it pioneered in 2007 and now has close to 24 million users in the East African nation of 45 million, handling billions of shillings in daily transfer volumes. The model has been copied in other regional markets and beyond.
Last year, the telecom operator suffered a outage for several hours that knocked out its services that the company then said was due to a network failure.
- Reuters
