Safaricom’s Fuliza Suffers Outage

Safaricom’s popular overdraft facility Fuliza experienced a system outage on Wednesday, causing inconvenience to millions of Kenyans who depend on the service for daily transactions.

Complaints surfaced on social media at around 3PM, with users unable to use the facility. Responding to customer queries on social media, Safaricom said that the overdraft facility was down due to a system glitch and that they were urgently working to have it resolved.

In one of the responses to a concerned user on Twitter, Safaricom apologized for the inconvenience caused, saying “Hi Shark, Our apologies for this. Some M-PESA services are currently down. We are urgently working to have this resolved.” By the time we were publishing this story, the problem had not been solved.

Safaricom’s Fuliza is one of the most popular mobile lending products in Kenya, providing users with access to short-term credit. The outage is likely to have affected millions of Kenyans who depend on the service for their daily expenses such as transportation and food. According to Safaricom’s half-year results, 7.4 million Kenyans borrowed from Fuliza amounting to over $300 million, translating to over $100 million per day.