Kenya's Safaricom says technical fault hits services

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NAIROBI, April 24 (Reuters) - Kenyan telecoms firm Safaricom said on its Twitter (Frankfurt: A1W6XZ - news) feed that it was working to fix a technical fault on its network that was affecting services countrywide on Monday.

Safaricom, which is 40 percent owned by Britain's Vodafone , is Kenya's leading telecoms operator. It has 26 million subscribers and dominates the thriving mobile-based financial services sector with its M-Pesa platform.

"We're having a technical issue that's affecting a number of core services in our network. We're working on resolving this as soon as possible," Safaricom said on its Twitter feed.

Safaricom gave no more details of the fault, but subscribers said phone calls and text messages were not going through and access to the M-Pesa platform was also down.

"Services are coming back up progressively, we apologise for any inconvenience encountered," it said.

Company officials were not available for immediate comment.

At 0805 GMT, Safaricom's shares were down 0.3 percent at 19.15 Kenyan shillings ($0.186) on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

($1 = 103.2000 Kenyan shillings) (Reporting by George Obulutsa; editing by Jason Neely)