MTN Uganda says every service knocked out by a power failure at one of its data centres is working again. The outage began on Sunday, 5 July 2026, and the company put out its statement on Tuesday.
Voice calls, mobile data and Mobile Money all stopped for a time, and customers across the country felt it in their conversations, their payments and their businesses. Technical teams brought the systems back, the company said. It added that customer data stayed secure and that Mobile Money balances were never at risk.
The statement opened with an apology to customers, businesses, agents, merchants and partners. “We acknowledge the inconvenience this caused to the customers, businesses, agents, merchants and partners who depend on our services every day,” MTN Uganda said. “To every customer who was affected, we sincerely apologise.”
The company also acknowledged what it called wider public concern. It has opened a review of the incident, with the stated aim of learning from it, hardening the network and making a repeat less likely.
“Uganda is home”
The statement was also a response to talk that followed the shutdown. Speculation had spread about the company’s future in the country, and MTN Uganda answered it with a short line it repeated at the start and the end: “Uganda is home.” It described its commitment to Uganda as long term and unchanged.
To back that up, the company pointed to its spending. In 2025 it put Ush 549.4 billion into expanding and strengthening the network. Coverage of the population reached 88.6 percent on 4G and 96.2 percent on 3G, and 5G is still being rolled out to more communities.
The weight of Mobile Money in that picture is large. MTN MoMo has 14.7 million active customers, more than 241,000 agents and over 114,000 merchants, so a stoppage on the platform reaches well beyond handset owners to the people who run shops and kiosks on it.
MTN Uganda said the outage showed why continued investment in reliability matters as the economy leans harder on digital connectivity. For now, it said, the immediate job has been restoring service and supporting affected customers, with attention turning to the resilience of its operations.
