Safaricom system maintenance to affect services

People seen walking outside a Safaricom shop. Safaricom has announced an ongoing system maintenance [Photo, Courtesy]

Safaricom has announced an ongoing system maintenance, which limits users’ ability to forward and bar calls.

The maintenance started on Thursday morning and is expected to continue to Sunday morning.

In a notice on Thursday, Safaricom said, “the minor system maintenance will start 0001 hrs (0:00 AM) on 20th June to 0600hrs (6:00 AM) 23rd June 2019”.

The Telco noted the maintenance would not impact on the availability of its services including voice, data, SMS and Mpesa.

However, it said customers will not be able to change their call forwarding and barring status during the period.

Reverse Calls

On Tuesday, the company announced a new feature the reverse call for its more than 31 million subscribers enabling callers to transfer the cost of a call to the receiver by adding ‘#’ before the number they are calling.

For instance, to transfer the cost of a call to 0722000000, a customer will dial #0722000000.

A customer receiving a reverse call request will see the caller’s details appear on the screen as normal, but once they pick the call, they will receive a voice prompt asking them to key in “1” to accept the reverse call. The cost of the call will be equivalent to the receiver’s normal call cost.

The service is only available for on-net calls and will not be applicable for off-net, roaming, and international calls.

The Reverse Call feature complements Safaricom’s existing “Please Call Me” service which enables a customer to send five free messages to other customers requesting for a callback.