Mozambique: 22.1% of 2022 State expenditure went to defence and public security
Photo: O País
From Sunday night until late Monday morning, it was not possible to carry out any transactions on ‘SIMO Rede’ electronic terminals, to the detriment of both citizens and economic agents.
ATMs, point-of-sale (POS) equipment and similar operations in the Ponto24 mobile network did not respond to commands from the customers of the banks connected to the SIMO network’s computer system from Sunday night until around 12 noon on Monday.
Dércio Guilherme was among those affected. He tried to shop at a supermarket and fill up his car in Maputo, but without success – payment terminals refused to cooperate. “I wanted to go shopping but everything was at a standstill – the mobile wallet and cards were not working. Because of that, we couldn’t do anything. I tried to fill up the car in the morning, but I couldn’t,” he said.
Student Abdallah Assane was collating documentation for a scholarship, but almost saw his dream postponed because the last day to pay some of his trip expenses coincided with the outage. “I was unable to make payments for the recognition of some scholarship documents,” he relates. “I don’t know if I lost [my application].”
Many commercial establishments were impacted by the hours-long hiatus – most of the stores in Maputo City have POS equipment as one of the main means of payment. “We saw many customers having to come back, because lately they have been paying by card,” said Fátima Mussagy, a store agent.
‘O País’ tried to contact the entity responsible for managing the SIMO network yesterday for answers about the causes of the blackout, but without success.
The last major blackout of the banking transaction network was recorded in 2019.
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