Ecocash’s woes continued into yesterday as the popular platform suffered glitch after glitch with angry customers fuming and breathing down its neck. The besieged payment provider assured members of the public that its engineers were working hard to restore and stabilise the service.

A tragedy of errors

Experience as taught us that when upgrades, especially major upgrades are conducted, the immediate aftermath is usually characterised by glitches. Sometimes there is even a little bit of chaos. We have seen this whenever banks do upgrades.

However, the last time we saw anything resembling what we are seeing with the Ecocash platform was when Steward Bank did their own upgrades years ago. To say that was not a smooth upgrade is an understatement.

Ecocash’s own upgrade problems are now approaching shambolic levels. As of late yesterday, the platform remained unstable, the important airtime menu kept disappearing and reappearing, those who wanted to buy airtime were either told the minimum purchase was $3 or $5 and the 999 system busy error kept popping up.

Not only that but it seems USSD services on the entire Econet platform were affected. Accessing USSD menus for Steward (*210#), FBC (*220#) and StanChart (*200#) did not work 9 times out of 10. Accessing the same services on NetOne was a breeze.

Our pending Wallet-to Bank transfer is still pending with no money our wallet and bank account. The money is hanging there somewhere in the ether. According to an Ecocash rep, the system is technically not even back online yet so they cannot resolve the issue.

Basically Ecocash is a mess right now. Nobody seems to know when this will end.