Operations at Huduma Centres across the country are back to normal after a nationwide outage on Thursday left hundreds of Kenyans stranded.
ICT systems at all the 62 Huduma centres in the country went down after contractors pulled their services over unpaid internet bills by the government.
“What is unavailable is ICT services which are offered by Safaricom and Telkom Kenya who halted their services because we are yet to pay outstanding bills of around Sh85 million from the previous financial year,” said Cabinet Secretary for Public Service Prof Margaret Kobia.
The CS explained that the bills had been overlooked as the government had closed its books on June 30 and opened new ones for 2018/2019, hence prompting a delay in settling last year’s bills.
The bills are paid on a quarterly basis.
“We are however working with the service providers to ensure that these bills are settled and full services restored to Huduma as soon as possible,” she said on Thursday.
By the close of day, the services had been restored.
In a statement, Huduma Centre CEO Dennis Mutuku said: “Further to a network downtime in all Huduma Centres countrywide today, we are pleased to inform our customers that the network has since been restored and we have resumed smooth service delivery.”
“We apologise for the downtime and endeavor to offer services to our customers as usual.”
