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Disrupted Government services after being hacked

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Disrupted Government services after being hacked
Eliud Owalo./Photo Courtesy

Variety of services provided by the government and the telecoms company Safaricom are temporarily unavailable.

Several Safaricom and Mpesa application services, including Lipa na Mpesa, Mshwari, Bank to Mpesa, and the Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) USSD code used for payment of power tokens, were affected, according to a spot check on Thursday afternoon, July 27.

Earlier on Thursday, a KPLC client who attempted to make a payment received the following response: “Transaction failed, M-PESA could not complete payment of Ksh2000.00 to KPLC PREPAID. Please try again later as the organization’s system experiencing technical difficulties.”

Customers’ complaints about being unable to access some services indicate that the breakdown appears to have had a greater impact on consumers.

On Thursday, Kenyans were incensed, with some wondering if the official government website had been hacked.

The e-Citizen platform was indeed compromised, according to Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Information, Communication, and Digital Economy Eliud Owalo.

Yes, the eCitizen platform was compromised; we are working to fix it. By sending the system more unusual queries, they attempted to jam it. However, neither data access nor data loss has occurred,” according to Owalo, who spoke with Spice FM.

Owalo claims that the hackers first slowed down the system before attempting to break in but failing.

The e-Citizen service was recently updated by the government to support more than 5,000 services from Numerous services, including the application for birth certificates, business registrations, marriage certificates, passports, and certificates of good conduct, among others, have been impacted by the outage.

Kenyans expressed their dissatisfaction with the services on social media.

“M-cop isn’t working, therefore I can’t access it. Due to M-pesa  outage, I am unable to pay for services as normal,” a Cooperative Bank customer complained.

 

 

 

 

Author

Milton Nyakundi

Milton Nyakundi is a veteran multimedia journalist with over 20 years of experience across broadcast, digital, and print media, who relocated to the United States in 2022 and is now the Senior International Correspondent for Kurunzi News based in Washington, DC, USA. He has previously worked with the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), among other high-profile roles with Kenya's first privately-owned media outlet - Kenya Television Network. His experience also include prominent roles as Media Consultant for Football Kenya Federation (FKF), and StarTimes Kenya. His career spans high‑stakes political reporting covering legislative and constitutional issues, elections, governance, and accountability across Kenya, Africa, and global arenas. He also boasts extensive sports journalism experience, covering local and international sports events, including leagues, tournaments and sports governance. He is well-known for his investigative depth, editorial leadership, and evidence-driven journalism that guides his consistent delivery of public‑interest storytelling across platforms.

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