Equity Bank will take its primary service number offline for maintenance next Monday, a move that raises fresh questions about strain on customer-facing systems after last month’s breakdown in its bank-to-M-PESA settlement channel.
The lender said the 0763 000000 line will be unavailable from 3am to 8am on 24 November. It did not specify whether other services will be affected. That lack of detail is key because call-centre interruptions often spill into longer wait times, slower issue resolution and confusion among customers who rely on the line to verify transactions or flag suspicious activity.
The outage comes a month after some Equity-to-M-PESA transfers failed to settle. The bank later returned the funds.
While the earlier incident stemmed from a technical fault in a settling link, it sharpened scrutiny on the bank’s systems and raised concerns that brief glitches can have knock-on effects for users with tight cash cycles.
The bank is pointing customers to its digital channels on X, Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok during the maintenance window.
Fraudsters often seize such moments to impersonate bank staff using lookalike numbers or cloned profiles. Some send fake reversal notices while others claim to offer help with stalled transactions. Each episode creates room for social-engineering attacks that target customers when they are unsure where to seek help.
The bank has encouraged customers to stay alert to unsolicited calls and texts during the window. The short outage will be watched closely, given recent pressure on service reliability and the wider scrutiny facing digital finance providers in Kenya.
