Safaricom to test major upgrade on m-pesa

An M-Pesa agent attends to a customer. PHOTO | FILE. 

Safaricom plans to completely shut down its popular money transfer service for about half a day this weekend for testing as it completes “the journey to bring M-Pesa home” — a reference to moving its servers to Kenya.

New customer registrations, personal identification number (PIN) changes and account activation will be unavailable in the 48 hours leading up to the shutdown. This includes signing up for M-Shwari and M-Kesho accounts.

The process of installing the M-Pesa servers locally began 24 months ago, with Safaricom having brought in 50 engineers from across the globe, mainly from Vodafone, IBM and Huawei to design, install the new platform and re-locate the servers locally.

In Summary New registrations, PIN changes and account activation will be unavailable in the 48 hours leading up to the shutdown.M-Pesa services will not be available from 11pm Saturday April 18, 2015, and will resume at noon Sunday April 19, 2015.

Story adopted from business daily.