­Kenya's Safaricom has suffered a major outage of its mobile money service, M-Pesa over the weekend, which it is blaming on the failure at a Vodafone data centre in Germany.

Vodafone is the majority shareholder in Safaricom and the data processing for the the mobile money service has always been handled by Vodafone, not locally in Kenya.

The outage was caused after the power failure reportedly damaged some of the server discs, resulting in the need for the backups to be restored.

"Our technical teams both here and in Germany are working to restore normal services as soon as possible. However, we expect services to resume later on today (Sunday). We regret the inconvenience caused." Safaricom Chief Executive Bob Collymore stated.

The outage of the service left a large number of customers without the ability to pay bills or even go shopping, so tightly have they become dependent on the cashless payment facility.

The company is also said to be looking at hosting the service locally following previous disruptions, even though a local server would be faster at processing transactions it would not automatically be more reliable.