Hardly minutes after Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba released the 2025 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE), students and parents have been left stranded after the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) portal went down.
The KNEC examination results portal went down on Friday, January 9, at around 11.30am, moments after CS Ogamba announced how to check the exam results online.
Ogamba, while addressing the press during the exam release, advised learners and parents to access their results through a dedicated portal on the KNEC website: results.knec.ac.ke.
Candidates were advised to enter their index number and any one of their names as per the registration data for the 2025 KCSE examination.
"The results will be live and accessible immediately after the end of this function. It is now my humble duty and privilege to declare the 2025 KCSE examination results officially released," Ogamba said.
However, just moments after finalising the release of the examinations, the portal was inaccessible, with many students and parents reporting a note showing 'site can't be reached'.
Several Kenyans took to the social media platforms to express their frustrations in accessing the examination results, with others calling on the exam council to intervene.
The government’s decision to allow Kenyans to access examination outcomes through an online portal was first launched during the release of the 2023 KCSE exams to ease access to the results.
The move was introduced as an addition to the process of accessing results through the Short Message Service (SMS), which also experienced similar challenges.
Nonetheless, the sudden outage of the portal has since been attributed to the huge traffic as thousands of students, parents and teachers attempt to access the single portal.
What to Do
If you’re trying to access the KCSE 2025 portal and it’s not loading, be patient. High traffic around results, confirmations, or downloads routinely overwhelms KNEC systems.
Give it time and try again later, ideally outside peak hours. You can keep refreshing to check whether the site is back.
If the site has returned and you are still unable to access it, or if the page only partially loads or throws strange errors, clear your browser cache and cookies before retrying or switching browsers.
You can also try accessing the site from a different network or device to rule out local issues.
Alternative Method of Accessing 2025 KCSE Results
Kenyans who are unable to access the KNEC portal can also check their results by sending their index numbers through an SMS to 20076 at a cost of Ksh25 per SMS.
To ease accessing the online results, students and parents are advised to continuously refresh the KNEC portal and clear the cache.
Meanwhile, according to Ogamba, out of the 993,226 candidates who sat the 2025 KCSE examination, 492,012 were male, while 501,214 were female, representing 49.54 per cent and 50.46 per cent of the total candidature, respectively.
1,932 candidates obtained an overall mean grade of A (plain) in the 2025 KCSE examination, with 270,715 candidates attaining the Grade C+, qualifying for direct university entry.
