This archive report was first published on 6 December 2019.
Published on December 6, 2019, a Kenyan man has filed a class-action lawsuit against Safaricom, the Communication Authority, and the Central Bank of Kenya over persistent outages on the M-Pesa mobile money transfer service.
According to court papers, Martin Muiruri, on behalf of himself and other registered M-Pesa customers, has issued a lawsuit against Safaricom for failing to process all M-Pesa transactions in a timely, continuous, and uninterrupted manner as per its terms of service.
The lawsuit cites several instances of M-Pesa outages in April and July 2017 and December 2018, with some disruptions lasting over eight hours. Muiruri argues that while Safaricom sent subscribers text messages during the disruptions, the explanations provided were not sufficient.
He further points out that he filed a complaint with the CBK and CA in December last year, but the regulators did not respond. Muiruri alleges that Safaricom's failure to meet the required uptime of 99.99 per cent service provision on their networks with redundancy provisions has resulted in significant losses for M-Pesa customers.
CA requires telecommunication mobile operators to maintain uptimes of 99.99 per cent service provision on their networks with redundancy provisions. Failure to meet this can attract fines of between Sh500,000 and 0.2 per cent of operator's gross turnover in fines, a decision the regulator waived.
