Angani, the Nairobi-based public cloud services company, has experienced a service outage. The outage is a result of a crash that occurred yesterday at 11:30pm (EAT). It has led to the corruption of the systems and has affected a number of services hosted on the company’s cloud.
A statement on the company’s website reveals that “Some of the systems have since been restored, but the quality of user experience has been degraded.” Among the affected services are Techweez, Maramoja, Abacus, Yumobile, Hapakenya, PropertyNinja and Ongair.
However, reports from Kenya suggest that this crash has been building up for some time now. Kennedy Kachwanya revealed on his website that the BAKE (Bloggers Association of Kenya) Digital Services that are hosted on Angani’s cloud have been experiencing issues with the service for a few weeks now. He wrote that “then the frequencies of the technical problems increased. Last Friday, the server was down, but we got the warning after it had been down for some time, for another downtime. The warning did not point out the downtime we were facing at the time.”
The degrading services from Angani was strange to Mr. Kachwanya, so he launched an investigation into Angani. His investigation revealed “that the CEO [Phares Kariuki] had been thrown out and the matter had been taken to court.” He added that the more he worked to find out more information about the situation, the more it became clear to him that Angani’s degraded services was a result of internal conflict in the management team.
Tech Moran reports that some aggrieved customers are ready to sue for downtime.
Here are some tweets weighing in on the matter:
Angani was heading in the right direction…at a point a thought it was the model on how to run a start-up…well, that was then
— Kachwanya (@kachwanya) November 5, 2015
https://twitter.com/tommakau/status/662209422148673537
https://twitter.com/tommakau/status/662240975931207680
https://twitter.com/tommakau/status/662253964944101376
https://twitter.com/tommakau/status/662269656980439040
Sam Gichuru hopes for the best for Angani
https://twitter.com/SamGichuru/status/662273709911224320
Sad to hear the problems at #Angani are being caused by boardroom wrangles.
— Naomi Mutua 🐾❤️ (@AKenyanGirl) November 5, 2015
The #angani situation is tragic I strongly believe in Cloud and it's ability to transform how we work
— Muriithi Mwirigi (@mwirigimuriithi) November 5, 2015
What to learn from the Angani crisis; have a hosting crash plan. In other words, back up regularly.
— Wamathai (@Wamathai) November 5, 2015
Tom Makau started making enquiries as to the nature of the challenge and this series of tweets followed:
https://twitter.com/tommakau/status/662178682308571137
https://twitter.com/Lungati/status/662199750805049344
https://twitter.com/tommakau/status/662201549821763584
@tommakau We do not have timelines as yet. But we will keep you posted on progress
— Angani Limited (@AnganiLTD) November 5, 2015
https://twitter.com/tommakau/status/662205792544800768
This is a developing story, and we have reached out to Angani Ltd for comment.
Photo Credit: Fred Moore 1947 via Compfight cc
