EcoCash up, why it went down on Tuesday?
On Tuesday 11:30hrs 03/10/2017 the most used and famous USSD *151# Ecocash went down for almost the whole day, which was something unbearable to all econet customers and it caused business to stop as there was no alternative method to transact via econet.
We don’t have information yet on why this outage happened. could it be that they were updating/ fixing their servers no one knows what was actually happening until 10 minutes later we received an sms
Some of the reasons we think caused the downtime was that maybe technicians are not doing their job properly. How can they run maintenance during the day when we all know that mobile banking has gone high since the introduction of plastic money or Econet’s infrastructure won’t keep up with the larger flows of traffic, on estimate over ecocash has over 2 million live users (those that just use ecocash once per month) so maybe Ecocash is using low end servers
since they are failing to accelerate the processing power.
We think Ecocash Management should start investing in high powered servers to stop such incidents from happening, a lot of speculation was that maybe the management are failing to sustain/failing to get the powerful servers eg IBM servers than the low end servers such as Dell which we assume most Zimbabwean systems ride on. Technicians however have a role as well to play within such problems as they are the ones that recommend management on the best move to take. Moving over it was said that Econet hire technicians from India to fix such problems which also contributed for the downtime to be long, don’t we (Zimbabwe) have such skills than outsourcing?