A Kenyan man has sued mobile network operator Safaricom for outages on the M-Pesa network, the Standard reported. In a class-action suit filed at the High Court in Nairobi, Martin Muiruri is suing Safaricom on his behalf and other registered M-Pesa customers for incessant downtime on the popular mobile money transfer service. The lawsuit also cites the Communication Authority (CA) and the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) as the second and third respondents respectively.
It accuses Safaricom of failing to process all M-Pesa transactions in a timely, continuous and uninterrupted manner as per its terms of service. On diverse dates in April and July 2017 and also on 02 December 2018, 09 December 2018 and 10 December 2018, the first defendant’s M-Pesa mobile transfer service experienced outages that lasted over eight hours, particulars of which are in the knowledge of the first and second and third defendants, says Murirui in court papers. The lawsuit also argues that while Safaricom sent subscribers text messages during the disruptions, the explanation given was not sufficient.
As a result of the alleged willful default and/or negligence of the first defendant to maintain and upgrade its M-Pesa system/services to the international communication standards, the plaintiff and all M-Pesa customers in Kenya and abroad were unable to pay for goods and services or in any way freely transact with the M-Pesa platform as envisaged in the terms and conditions of M-Pesa users agreement, the applicant claims.
Muiruri further points out that he filed a complaint with the CBK and CA in December last year, but the regulators did not respond. CA requires telecommunication mobile operators to maintain uptimes of 99.99 percent service provision on their networks with redundancy provisions. Failure to meet this can attract fines of between KES 500,000 and 0.2 percent of operator's gross turnover in fines, a decision the regulator waived.
