The Kenya Revenue Authority iTax portal under the e-citizen platform crashed for more than 30 hours on Wednesday and Thursday, locking out thousands of users.
Thousands of small businesses and those seeking government services were unable to prepare invoices and make payments after the outage disabled all KRA’s functionalities under the platform.
The eCitizen portal offers services like business registration, licensing, and tax obligations.
The Star reached out to KRA, and the taxman clarified that it does not manage enquiries related to the eCitizen platform, saying those are handled by the Ministry of Interior and National Administration.
“Enquiries on eCitizen can’t be handled by KRA needs to reach out to the Huduma Secretariat or the parent Ministry of Interior,” KRA said in a reply.
Pesaflow Limited, one of the three consortia of companies running the system, acknowledged that the portal had reported a downtime but assured users that work was in progress to restore the portal before the close of business on Thursday.
Pesaflow is the company that enables real-time settlements and reconciliations by enabling payments to various parties through virtual accounts.
“It’s a work in progress, and we are working to restore the services you can try later on in the afternoon,” the payment company said on the phone.
The assurance comes amid growing frustration among users after the blackout on the portal disrupted payments for services, without prior warning or notice to users.
At the time of writing, there has been no detailed public explanation of the outage causes nor a definitive timeline for full restoration.
The e Citizen portal has in recent months faced outages for different occasions. On 3 January 2025, the eCitizen payment service crashed, leaving many users—including tourists at national parks—unable to make payments.
The platform was later restored after a technical issue described as an “internal network occurrence”.
On 31 July 2025, the Business Registration Service (BRS) reported outages of two key services (CR12 and CR13) on the eCitizen portal that handles business name and company registration data.
On 20 – 21 June 2025, the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) announced scheduled system maintenance affecting eCitizen services for a 16-hour window, causing intermittent unavailability of vehicle‐registration and licensing services via the platform.
On 23 July 2023, the platform suffered what was characterised as a cyber-attack or system overload: the government reported services were inaccessible due to “massive traffic” from multiple sources.
A special audit released in August 2025 found that eCitizen had recorded system downtimes and that these failures posed risks to business continuity and public service delivery.
by JACKTONE LAWI
