Safaricom's M-Pesa is scheduled to have a power outage this coming Saturday. The mobile money service has had regular outages in the past two weeks, scheduled to happen more intermittently.

This is according to Kenya tech news, who report that this weekend's outage will run for 4 hours, "only after the upgrade processes have been optimised."

M-Pesa has had two outages in the past two weeks, as the mobile phone-based money transfer service undergoes its third major upgrade since it launched in 2007 and the first such upgrade since Safaricom migrated the platform to Kenya in 2015.

In June, Safaricom said in a blog post that the third and final upgrade would be the official changeover to the new platform, resulting in a 12-hour outage. However, tech news Kenya reports that it will occur for only four hours this coming Saturday.

As a result of the upgrade process, all M-PESA services were unavailable for a period of two hours on 30 June 2017, from 1 AM to 3 AM. International Money Transfer (IMT), KCB M-PESA, M-Shwari and M-Kesho services were also unavailable on 5 July 2017 for a period of two hours, from 1.00 A.M. to 3.00 AM.

Following the upgrade, M-Pesa customers are set to benefit from an increase in the number of services on the platform. Safaricom says; "This will be made possible through a new set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will simplify the process of integration into M-Pesa, cutting down the time it takes from weeks to a few days or even hours."