EcoCash Down Again For The 2nd Time Today, Now It’s Worse

Shopping, basic commodities, Home Affairs

EcoCash, Zimbabwe’s biggest mobile money services provider with over 95% share of the market has been having problems lately. In the last couple of weeks the platform seemed to have stabilised but today…

This afternoon

For over two hours in the afternoon EcoCash was not working properly. The most problematic transactions were ‘pay merchant’ transactions. Specifically those that are initiated by the merchant e.g when you buy stuff in a super market and the attendant asks you for your EcoCash number and the next thing, your phone is asking you for a PIN to confirm the transaction.

Sending money and initiating merchant payment yourself as well as transfers to bank or transfers from bank were working just fine. It looks like there is a problem with the integration between EcoCash and merchants, this seems to be the most affected by the outrages. In Harare’s CBD a lot of merchants were not accepting EcoCash as a payment method in the afternoon.

Now…

Right now the platform is down again. This time you can’t access any of the menus. Whether you are using the app or USSD, you can’t access the service.

EcoCash is the most important consumer transaction platform in Zimbabwe processing most of such transactions. Whatever is causing these now frequent down times needs to be fixed. A platform of this importance must not go down for two hours.