Kenya's Safaricom resumes some services after network outage

Kenya's Safaricom said it had resumed some of its services, including voice calls, after a network outage on Monday knocked out services at the country's biggest telecoms operator.
The firm, which is 40 percent owned by Britain's Vodafone, operates the M-Pesa mobile-phone cash platform, used to transact billions of shillings in transfers, payments and loans by customers, businesses and banks. 
Safaricom said its network suffered an outage at 0930 local time (0630 GMT).
"Data, SMS, M-Pesa and Enterprise services will be available intermittently until the issue is fully resolved," Safaricom said in a statement.
Services, such as calling and text messaging, were being restarted by noon local time.
The company last suffered a major outage two years ago when the network went down in the capital Nairobi, a source at the company said, declining to say when it last had a national outage.
Safaricom, which is biggest company on the Nairobi bourse by value, has 27.7 million subscribers, or 71.2 percent of the market. Its users struggled to communicate or make transactions when the network went down.
"Our businesses suffered because our customers couldn't reach us," said Peter Njoroge, a taxi driver in downtown Nairobi.
At 1200 GMT, Safaricom's shares were down 0.3 percent at 19.00 shillings ($0.1841) each on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.
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