Many people report that Zimswitch went down for around 3 hours in the afternoon of today. Due to the outage, several businesses were not able to process swipe transactions which rely on Zimswitch to be working. Apart from that, people were also not able to use ZimSwitch Instant Payment Interchange Technology (ZIPIT) to make transfers between banks.
Most of us Zimbabweans have had to adapt to the use of plastic money to pay for goods as the cash crisis has hit the economy. Since a lot of people rely on Zimswitch and ZIPIT, many were outraged and confused as to why it was not working anymore.
The Zimswitch outage came at an unfortunate time as some Zimbabweans were on a panic buying spree due to being frightened by messages circulating on social media that say basic commodities will soon vanish from shelves. Apart from that, fuel shortages have also started to occur so some people were already trying to make sure their fuel tanks were full to the brim but upon trying to swipe for the fuel, they are greeted with an error.
It seems like the recent surge in the use of Zimswitch as people were stocking up might have caused the outage that occurred earlier today. Probably the system could not cope with the number of transactions that were trying to be processed at any given time so it decided to take a leave.
Due to Zimswitch being down, some local bank USSD codes were not available and the option for ZIPIT was even missing from the mobile apps of some local banks. The system has since been restored and seems to be available and working properly now.
Some businesses might have made significant losses due to being unable to process the transaction. Hopefully, this won’t become a regular thing as people depend on the system heavily.
Dear customer, please be advised that we are facing system challenges affecting ZIPIT & Ecocash bank to wallet services.Please bear with us
— Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe (@StanbicBankZW) September 25, 2017
Please note that Zimswitch service is currently down at the moment. You may try again later before day end. nrm
— Steward Bank (@stewardbank) September 25, 2017
Please note ZIPIT will be restored once we have rectified a challenge which our customers were facing when trying to use the function
— CBZ Holdings (@CBZHoldings) September 25, 2017
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2 comments
An attempt to slow down the thriving zipit aided currency market??
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This is soooo unacceptable, i dont even know if your platform was made for jolly-pading or business, what kind of EDI/money transfer system is this that needs to go offline for an upgrade to be done, whatever the system architecture ,you got , its got to be revised, we give you 100% commitment to your platform and you give the nation a half baked system. Someone needs to take responsibility Of this mess because this was so unprofessional from the COO to the CEO especially when Zimswitch publishes conflicting statements on what actually transpired. DONT LIE TO US ABOUT THE FUTURE with ZIPIT BECAUSE IT IS WAAAAY BEHIND WHERE WE ARE RIGHT NOW LIKE MICROSOFT DOS…. #please
I might move my buzz n partners to Paynet i heard its doing instant payments just fine