Kenya: Airtel users across the country face mobile data downtime

Kenya's Airtel users have experience service outage on mobile data, according to a news report by Gadgets Africa.

At a time when you are so dependent on your internet for work, school, or just entertainment, it would be a nightmare to have an outage of any kind. Well, it’s unfortunately happened for Airtel users around the country that have had a mobile data downtime.

It is not clear how long exactly the outage has lasted as it seems to vary with different subscribers. For some, it seems to have lasted the whole day yesterday. Others took to Twitter to complain that they have had issues with their mobile data even longer than that.

There is no word from the telco on what exactly caused it but it is clear that it has affected a number of subscribers as many Kenyans as internet usage has proven to spike over the last few months.

As of April this year, regular internet data traffic was reported to going as high as 57.8 Gbps. This is a huge spike in comparison to 7.5 Gbps that was reported in January 2020.

In the same month, Safaricom PLC was reporting a 40% traffic surge that saw 2.34 Petabytes of data via mobile and fixed home internet carried daily. In English, this translates to five million hours of continuous viewing.