Last weekend, mobile operator Safaricom, which holds the highest market share in Kenya, experienced serious disruptions to its telecoms network. The outage restricted customers from calling, texting and even using Mobile Money (MPESA) services across the country.

The Communications Authority (CA), which intends to find out the reasons for this situation, is considering conducting an investigation. “Safaricom is in a unique situation where a network outage would cause a threat to the economy. A lot of people rely on their voice, data and MPESA services to run their businesses so it is critical that they maintain 99.99% uptime at any one time,” a source told techweez.com.

“If Safaricom is found liable, they will be fined up to 0.2% of their revenues according to the law, which in their case could be hundreds of millions of shillings,” the source said. The company has nearly 34 million subscribers in a market made of nearly 45 million people.

This is the second time this year that Safaricom's telecom network has experienced problems. Last August, the telecom operator's subscribers complained about disruptions in data service.