Kenyans have been lamenting for the better part of the afternoon about being unable to make any transaction on the popular Safaricom and M-Pesa applications on their phones.

Many subscribers took to various social media platforms to complain amid speculations on what was happening to the service offered by Kenya’s largest telecommunications provider.

Safaricom, in a communication later Thursday afternoon, confirmed that mobile money transfer service M-Pesa was indeed not available on both M-Pesa and Safaricom apps.

“M-Pesa services on the M-Pesa and Safaricom apps are currently unavailable,” said Safaricom.

The technology-driven firm instead advised its subscribers who wants to transact on the platform to use an availed USSD code option as Safaricom works to restore the services.

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“We are working to restore our apps, in the meanwhile, you can make M-Pesa transactions through *334#,” the company headed by CEO Peter Ndegwa advised.

The outage, which has also affected Bank to M-Pesa services, has been blamed on system "downtime" as Kenyans continue to speculate amid claims of hacking of various government systems by a group of hackers based in Sudan.  

“We do apologize for any inconveniences caused,” Safaricom concluded.

M-Pesa has registered more than 32 million active monthly users and with a whopping Sh90 billion transacted on the mobile money transfer platform every single day.

According to Safaricom’s audited results for the Financial Year ended March 2023, Kenyans transacted a monstrous Sh35.86 trillion through the mobile platform in the year 2022.