M-PESA, the service most Kenyans use to pay for transport, food and bills, was disrupted across the country from around 2am on Wednesday, 28 October, according to The Kenya Times. Customers reported failed attempts to send money, buy airtime and pay bills, and the problem also reached M-PESA-linked services such as the Ziidi investment platform.
Safaricom acknowledged the fault on its official X account. "Hello. We apologise for the M-PESA service disruption. Our teams are working urgently to restore services and minimise inconvenience," the company said. It did not say what caused the problem, how many customers were affected, or when service would be fully back.
A day after a report on trust
The timing is awkward. On 27 October Safaricom launched its 2026 Sustainable Business Report in Nairobi. According to TechTrendsKE, the report says the company detected about 1.25 billion intrusion attempts in its 2026 financial year and investigated more than 130,000 security events. "Those numbers underline why digital trust is not an IT issue. It is a leadership issue, a customer issue and increasingly a sustainability issue," Ndegwa said at the launch.
The same report puts privacy trust scores at 70% for M-PESA and 61% for Safaricom, after a recovery during the year, TechTrendsKE reports.
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In September 2025 Safaricom moved M-PESA to a new core platform it calls Fintech 2.0, its largest upgrade since 2015. Ndegwa said then that the system lifts processing from 4,500 to 6,000 transactions a second, with room to scale to 12,000, and runs on an "active-active" setup across several hosting sites to reduce interruptions, according to K24 Digital. Wednesday's failure puts that promise to the test.
For traders, riders and small shops that take payment only through M-PESA, the morning was a reminder of how much rides on one service. One user quoted by The Kenya Times urged Kenyans to carry cash as a backup; others used the moment to call for more competition in mobile money.
