Cellulant Experiencing Service Unavailability, Banks Go Down

Cellulant, one of the leading digital payment companies in Africa, is currently battling with technical glitches that has affected all its clients, mostly banks and other financial services companies. According to their website, the company has a digital payments ecosystem that connects 95 banks in 13 countries servicing 34 countries. A message sent to their customers indicates that their technical team has identified a problem “with the primary VMWare service, where applications are hosted.”

“Preliminary checks have diagnosed a problem with our primary VMWare where applications are hosted. We are engaging both our system integrator and the vendor (VMWare) for further assistance to resolve the issue,” the statement said. “We have experienced some challenges with failover due to a dependency between PR and DR which is actively being worked on. Revised ETR (Estimated Time of Return/Repair) is 90 minutes, the statement concluded.

As of now, Cellulant has advised that the revised expected time of recovery is 90 minutes. This technical glitch is affecting customers in Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Botswana. Thus, banking services that are powered Cellulant are effectively inaccessible.

Disaster Failover is a protocol that guarantees a backup server or system that can run or continue running the company’s critical objectives until the original system is restored. In the case of Cellulant, the downtime will set those affected back especially considering the crisis that the country is currently in. Tech downtime is something that should have continuity whilst the team in question restores the IT infrastructure.