Listed telco giant Safaricom is upgrading its M-Pesa platform to handle up to 8,000 transactions per second (TPS) by the end of 2026, doubling its current peak capacity of 4,000 TPS.
- •This marks a major leap from the 616 TPS capability when M-Pesa was localized in 2015.
- •An interim milestone of 6,000 TPS is set for April 2026.
- •M-Pesa now runs on 700+ servers, across three environments (one production and two disaster recovery), allowing seamless traffic switchovers in under 4 minutes.
“When M-Pesa came home in 2015, we thought that 616 TPS was really high,” recalls Felix K. Rop, Head of Financial Services Technology at Safaricom. “But today, we’re already at 4,000 TPS, and by April 2026 we aim to hit 6,000 TPS, with a final target of 8,000 TPS by the end of the year.”
M-Pesa Transactions Current Capacity:
- •Per second: 4,000
- •Per minute: 240,000
- •Per hour: 14.4 million
- •Per day: 345.6 million
- •Per week: 2.4 billion
- •Per month (avg 30.33 days): 10.5 billion
- •Per year (364 days): 125.8 billion
The upgrade involves shifting to a 100% cloud-native, active-active architecture, enabling greater scalability, uptime, and flexibility.
“We are going into a new modern M-Pesa very soon,” says Felix. “It will be 100% cloud-native, highly configurable, secure, and resilient—built for the future of digital finance in Africa.”
According to Felix, this growth isn’t just reactive—it’s strategic. “We’re planning based on forecasted demand, not just current usage,” Felix notes. The system still sees significant activity even during off-peak hours, processing around 300 transactions per second at 1 AM on weekends.
M-Pesa’s database has evolved from 16-core to 64-core, now using sharding to improve performance and reliability. The platform supports 45,000 integrations, 100,000 developers, and more than 10 internal systems, including Zidisha and Fuliza.
“What we have today is a system that runs in three environments: production and two disaster recovery environments,” says Felix. “If we lose one environment, we can seamlessly switch traffic to another. If we lose a database, the same database automatically switches over to standby in less than a minute. And in the case of an entire site outage, traffic can be rerouted in under 4 minutes.”
Today, M-Pesa performs nearly two system upgrades every other week or month, all while maintaining uptime and continuity. A single minute of downtime would affect approximately 240,000 customer requests, making uptime critical.
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