Kenyan telecoms regulator awaits report on Safaricom outage

NAIROBI, April 25 (Reuters) - Kenya's telecoms regulator said on Tuesday it was waiting for a full report on an outage that knocked out services for several hours at the country's biggest operator, Safaricom.

The operator, which is 40 percent owned by Britain's Vodafone, suffered the outage on Monday, which left its 27.7 million subscribers out of reach and without access to mobile financial services.

"The Authority is awaiting a comprehensive report of the incident from Safaricom in order to determine whether there was any omission on their part in line with the obligations of their license," the Communications Authority (CA (Frankfurt: A0JC59 - news) ) said in a statement.

The CA said it was too early to tell if the company would be fined, since the cause of the outage was not clear. Outages caused by factors beyond the control of an operator, technically known as force majeure, usually do not attract sanctions.

Safaricom, which has a 71.2 percent market share, said full restoration of the network after the outage ended on Tuesday morning, adding it was working to maintain stability.

Its shares fell 0.79 percent in Tuesday's session to close at 18.95 shillings ($0.1836) each, from Monday's close of 19.10 shillings. ($1 = 103.2000 Kenyan shillings) (Reporting by Duncan Miriri; editing by Alexander Smith)