Kenya’s telecoms operator Safaricom has apologized to its customers for hitches experienced by customers on its network in the last few days and reassured them on ongoing efforts to improve services.

The problem was occasioned by a switch to a new data billing platform, carried out over the weekend. Most affected were data customers, who had challenges purchasing data bundles and experienced intermittent access to internet. As a result, some customers were unable to make calls despite the fact that they still had sufficient balance on their accounts.

“The system will allow for much more flexibility in billing for data and provide customers with more options in the future. The system, whilst complicated, has been under test for some time and, whilst we anticipated some minor problems initially, it has taken our vendor some time to get the system working optimally. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and assure our customers that the situation is being closely monitored to ensure normal services resume as soon as possible. We advise that while most issues have been resolved, there is a queue which we are still handling.

We have started communicating with all affected customers through SMS to reach a resolution,” said Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph.

“Our engineers are continuously engaged to ensure the system is working according to our specifications.  The new billing is part of ongoing efforts to improve our overall service delivery and meet the expectations of our customers,” he added.