Airtel Money has announced a scheduled outage, which is set to affect its customers using mobile payment services.
In a statement on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, the second-leading mobile money operator in the country indicated that its customers should brace for the second part of a system maintenance, which will last 12 hours.
“Following our notice on April 6, 2025, we will be conducting the second and last phase of our Airtel Money system upgrade designed to enhance customer experience and improve our capabilities that will deliver more innovative products and solutions,” the mobile service provider stated.
Services unavailable
“This last phase is scheduled for May 3, 2025, from 11:00 pm to May 4, 2025, 11:00 am. During this time, all Airtel Money services will be unavailable.”
The company also indicated that it would offer a limited incentive to its customers who would be inconvenienced by the outage, which would affect all Airtel Money services.
“We understand that the downtime may cause temporary inconvenience, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption. As a token of our appreciation, on resumption of normal service operations, all Bank to Airtel Money transactions, Paybill payments and Agent Withdrawals will immediately qualify you for 100 per cent cashback (Rudishiwa) of the transaction fee as airtime until May 4, 2025, midnight,” Airtel stated.
In their previous service outage on April 6, 2025, the mobile service provider disabled all services from midnight to around midday, when all the services were fully restored.
Similarly, the company offered cashback incentives for bank-to-Airtel Money transactions, agent withdrawals and paybill payments.
Market share
Earlier in the year, Airtel Money slightly increased its market share to close the year 2024 at a record 7.6 per cent. This is in comparison to Safaricom M-Pesa’s 92.3 per cent during the last quarter of the same year.
With the proliferation of mobile money usage in the country, the mobile money industry has witnessed an increase in subscriptions, which crossed the 40-million mark in September 2024.
With the mobile money penetration rate at close to 80 per cent in the country, mobile money agents have also increased, with the latest survey indicating that mobile money attendants are now at 365,432.
The increase in usage of the services also witnessed the increase of the daily transaction cap from Ksh300,000 to Ksh500,000 to cater for clients operating with larger sums of money.
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