M-Pesa back after successful upgrade

Safaricom’s mobile money transfer platform M-Pesa yesterday got back into operations after a short weekend shutdown to allow for a systems upgrade.

After the successful upgrade, Safaricom’s CEO, Bob Collymore took to Social media via his twitter handle and announced, “And we’re live again on M-Pesa. One of the biggest IT projects carried out in Africa. Thanks to our customers for your patience.”

The CEO also posted the photos of the team that were behind ‘bringing M-PESA home’ and thanked them for their effort. The news was taken up with an uproar by Kenyans On Twitter (#KOT), where they took on hashtag, #MPESAlmewasili and gave their views.

There were fears that most of the services that relay on M-PESA would be affected but the operation was too fast that the effect was not felt.

Following the migration, Safaricom temporarily shut down all M-Pesa transactions from 11 pm on Saturday for testing before switching it back on Sunday at 11.30 am – half an hour earlier than the telco had scheduled, allowing customers to pay for electricity, water, and other utility bills normally. Safaricom’s new M-Pesa platform is expected to go live by the end of this month, raising the stakes in the battle to dominate Kenya’s lucrative mobile money industry.

The installation of M-Pesa servers in Kenya brings to an end nearly eight years of foreign hosting. The telco said that the “second generation” M-Pesa platform has a bigger capacity, is much faster and mitigated from interruptions. With the servers at home now, transactions are set to grow up from 450 transactions up to 900 transactions per second.

Over the eight years M-Pesa has grown in leaps to reach 90 million customers and has grown up to a value of Kshs 8 billion. It is also a great contributor in the country’s GDP as mobile money currently contributes up to 40 per cent to the GDP growth.