Kenya’s giant telecommunications firm Safaricom has suffered a countywide outage earlier today that has affected voice calls, data and M-Pesa services.

The outage, which the firm attributes to a technical hitch, made it impossible for Safaricom’s subscribers to access the above services for the better part of the morning.

Users took to social media to air their frustrations as the firm made efforts to assure them that they were working to solve the issue. By the time of posting this article, the hashtag Safaricom was trending on twitter with 17k tweets.

“We wish to notify the public that starting from 9:30 am today, we experienced a system outage affecting a number of core services in our network. This outage affected Voice, Data, SMS, M-PESA and Enterprise services.

We have identified the root cause of the outage and are working to resolve this in the shortest time possible. In the meantime, Voice, Data, SMS, M-PESA and Enterprise services will be available intermittently until the issue is fully resolved.

We will continue to update customers on the progress to restore services. We apologize for any inconvenience caused,” Safaricom posted on their social media sites.

Safaricom accounts for more than 70 per cent of mobile service subscriptions in the country.

Below are some of the tweets shared under the #Safaricom in this outage:

Apollo Mboya: The Safaricom Network Outage today was a dry run on how the network will be incapacitated on the Election Day

David Macharia‏: Seriously? Tried to call Safaricom customer care representative and I got the “mteja hapatikani.”

Fred oluoch anuroh‏:   nwhat is happening with safaricom? Call drops every time. Ama wao pia wameenda nomination

Nzisa‏:  My calls on Safaricom are dropping is anyone else experiencing the same?

Atanas‏: What’s wrong with Safaricom Kenya network in Nairobi?

El Mucho Ding-Dong‏:  Alas @Safaricom_Care si you guys send me a pigeon, I need to send a text message to someone in Meru.