Safaricom has announced that M-Pesa services will be unavailable on Sunday for four hours - from 12 am to 4 am - to allow for a system upgrade.
An earlier announcement by the telecom giant had stated that M-Pesa would be unavailable for 11 hours.
"Contrary to the earlier announced outage period, M-Pesa services will only be unavailable for four hours starting Sunday, July 16 from 12 am to 4 am.,” Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore stated in a notice to customers on Thursday.
He added, "We expect all services to be restored and M-Pesa to be fully functional following the process. We thank our customers for their continued support during this update."
Safaricom embarked on a three-week upgrade of the mobile money platform from June 30.
The new updates will see new features added and some functions automated reducing the need for customers to make requests at its call centre.
The system upgrade will also reduce the time that new partners take to be integrated onto the M-Pesa system from weeks to a few hours and also see M-Shwari and KCB M-PESA integrated into the Safaricom App.
"Since launching M-Pesa we have experienced tremendous growth as the platform has grown to provide even more value to the ecosystem," Mr Collymore stated when announcing the upgrade.
“This upgrade paves the way for the next phase of M-Pesa and will enable the service deliver even more value for our customers and partners.”
Safaricom noted the tests they had conducted since the upgrade started had seen them optimise several processes, significantly reducing the anticipated downtime.
