On the evening of Saturday 8th December 2018, Kenyans who rely on Mpesa for money transactions were left stranded and helpless due to massive blackout which was experienced across the country.
Mpesa users could not send or receive money, pay via Lipa Na Mpesa nor even buy credit or any other related service from Mpesa.
Safaricom which owns the mobile money transfer utility acknowledged the outage and promised to resolve the matter.
On the following day Sunday, the biting issues had been resolved but Kenyans who had enough of the breakdown were unforgiving.
Safaricom later confirmed the issues had been resolved and apologized to its customers.
Check out some of the reasons that may have caused Safaricom’s Mpesa go down
1.Hacking
Safaricom responded to the menace after long hours of waiting by concerned customers.
The issue which was reported early in the morning, was replied to by Safaricom after 8 hours, in the evening.
Their reason was so ambiguous, it read ‘database degradation’ which simply means database needed to be serviced after long use.
It seemed like they were not sure what was wrong with their database servers and opted to blame degradation
This could have easily meant that hackers might have find access to their database and upon realizing it, shut everything down to neutralize their threat, thus causing the outage
2.Traffic clogging
Being a festive season, and especially on weekend, their systems might have been overwhelmed and thrown down their tools of work without notice.
Normally, a system which is stretched beyond its limit will just go down like a person trying to lift a load he can’t handle.
3.Technical hitch
Normally in systems that relates to computers, they would break down often without warning and this is normal.
Mpesa then would be the latest victim of such natural errors in computer database and networking
4.Malicious Attack
Malicious attack exists anywhere where a computer and a network can be located.
There are people who enjoy seeing down and crumbling like a falling tall building
Applied to MPESA, malicious attacks might have seen them victims
5. Maintenance
System maintenance can be a blame, only that the engineers never thought it will affect them as such.
One would think the situation won’t be bad, but in Engineering any fair or bad can turn to worse in seconds!
