6 min read

Your Payment App Goes Down. Here's What That Costs Your Business.

Editorial illustration of a Lagos market vendor and customer looking at a smartphone showing a failed mobile money payment
Illustration by HotKiosk

Mobile money now processes more than 80 billion transactions a year across Africa. But the infrastructure behind it breaks down too often. From Nigeria to South Africa, fibre cuts and network failures are knocking payment systems offline, and the bill lands on shop owners.

How Africa came to run on digital payments

Mobile money grew faster in Africa than anywhere else. It skipped the card and bank-branch era almost entirely. Today, across much of the continent, paying by phone is not a novelty. It is the main way people buy and sell.

Instant payment volumes across Africa have grown at an average of 35% each year since 2020, according to TechCabal. Total mobile money transactions now exceed 80 billion per year. In Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, and dozens of other markets, mobile wallets and USSD payments serve hundreds of millions of active users.

For a shop owner, that growth looks like customers who no longer carry cash. They pay by phone. Merchants pay suppliers by phone. Staff receive wages by phone. When the system works, it is seamless. When it does not, everything stops.

What keeps going wrong

The biggest single cause is physical damage to the cables that carry internet and mobile data.

In Nigeria alone, MTN recorded 9,218 fibre-optic cable cuts in 2025. That is more than 25 cuts a day. Roadworks caused roughly 70% of the damage. Vandals and cable thieves caused most of the rest, according to BusinessDay Nigeria and ITEdge News.

Each cut can knock out mobile data, USSD services, and bank transfers across multiple states at once. And USSD is how most mobile money transactions work in Africa. When the cable goes, USSD goes with it, and so does the ability to pay or get paid.

Nigeria is not alone. Across the continent, dropped network connections remain one of the biggest barriers to digital payment adoption, according to AfricaNenda, an African payments research body. South Africa is investing in payments infrastructure but still faces gaps in the layer that connects payment systems to each other, according to IT-Online.

The result is transactions that fail mid-process. Money leaves the buyer's account but does not reach the seller. The payment shows as pending for days. And neither party knows whose problem it is to fix.

What it costs when payments fail

For a big company, a failed transaction is a customer support ticket. For a small shop, it can mean a lost sale.

A customer who cannot pay by phone at your counter does not always have cash. They may walk away. If it happens during a busy period, those sales do not come back. And if your supplier requires mobile money payment before releasing stock, a failed transaction means you wait for delivery until the money clears.

Settlement delays make it worse. Many mobile money systems promise same-day or next-day settlement. When infrastructure is overloaded or cables are cut, settlement can slip to three to five business days. That is three to five days where your cash is in transit and you cannot restock.

Unresolved and failed transactions are costing businesses across Africa billions each year, according to TechCabal. For micro and small businesses operating on thin margins, even a few failed payments a month can tip a week's cash flow into the negative.

What the big players are doing about it

The scale of the problem is pushing payment providers to invest in reliability.

Safaricom has committed more than KES 40 billion (roughly $310 million) to upgrading M-PESA's infrastructure. The platform now handles 6,000 transactions per second, up from around 100 a few years ago. Safaricom's target is 8,000 transactions per second by the end of 2026, with the ability to scale to 12,000 during peak times.

African regulators are also changing how they treat digital payments. Where they once focused mostly on licensing and fraud prevention, they are now treating payment rails as critical national infrastructure. The Central Bank of Nigeria has set minimum uptime requirements for digital payment systems and is pushing telecoms and banks to improve reliability or face penalties.

More payment providers are publishing uptime data publicly. Some are offering compensation when transactions fail and are not resolved within a set time window. That is new in Africa, and it signals that the industry is taking reliability seriously.

How to protect your business

You cannot fix the fibre network. But you can reduce the damage when it breaks.

Why This Matters

Africa's digital economy is heading toward $1.5 trillion by 2030, according to TechCabal. Most of that value will move through mobile money. Shop owners, market vendors, and traders are not just users of the system. They are its foundation.

When payments fail at the shop level, it does not show up in a company's quarterly report. It shows up in a vendor's cash flow, in a delayed stock order, in a customer who left and did not come back. The reliability gap is real, and it hits the people at the bottom of the payment chain hardest.

Conclusion

Digital payments have changed how Africa trades. But 9,000-plus fibre cuts a year in Nigeria alone shows that the infrastructure behind those payments is still fragile. Safaricom's KES 40 billion upgrade and tighter regulations are a start. Until the network is more reliable, the best thing a shop owner can do is plan for the days when the system does not work.

Sources

More Stories

Kenya Fuel Prices Hit Record: What Businesses Pay Now

IMF Africa 2026 Outlook: What It Means for Your Shop

Kenya Digital Lenders Hit 227: What Shop Owners Must Know