Peter Ndegwa
Safaricom PLC has announced a planned M-Pesa system upgrade scheduled to take place on Monday, September 22, 2025.
In a statement on Friday, September 19, Safaricom said the system upgrade will take place between 12:30 AM and 3:30 AM.
“For 18 years, M-PESA has continued to transform lives across Kenya, connecting you, our customers, to opportunities every day.
“To support this and meet our promise to offer always-on, safe, secure, and worry-free financial products and services, we will be conducting a scheduled system upgrade on Monday, 22ⁿᵈ September 2025, from 0:30 AM to 3:30 AM,” read the statement in part.
During the upgrade period, Safaricom said, all M-Pesa services, including airtime purchase, will be temporarily unavailable.
The company explained that the timing of the upgrade has been carefully selected to minimise disruption and has apologised in advance for any inconvenience caused.
“The timing of this maintenance activity has been planned to result in minimal inconvenience to our customers. We apologize for any inconvenience that may be caused and thank you for your continued support,” Safaricom stated.
The upgrade will involve transitioning Safaricom’s M-PESA system to Fintech 2.0, a next-generation core platform designed to strengthen resilience, expand capacity, and unlock advanced AI-driven innovations.
Safaricom’s Chief of Financial Services, Esther Waititu, explained on Friday that focusing on these areas will make the company future-ready, as they align with current global trends.
“We process a lot of transactions daily. To give your perspective, when we started 18 years ago, we processed fewer than 100 transactions per second.
“Today, we average 100 million transactions daily, and the number keeps growing. As we introduce more use cases and continue to innovate, transaction speed and system design must improve. Cloud infrastructure is critical to achieving that,” said Waititu.
This is the second system maintenance exercise Safaricom will carry out on its M-PESA platform in 2025. The first took place on March 24, 2025, when services were briefly interrupted for about 30 minutes, from 1:00 AM to 1:30 AM.
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