500.002.1001Daraja API errorM-Pesa error 500.002.1001: Service temporarily unavailable / under maintenance
This is a Daraja API error — Safaricom rejects the request itself, before any customer prompt, usually over authentication or payload validation.
What causes it
The Daraja service is temporarily unavailable, throttled (spike arrest), or under maintenance, returning HTTP 500.
How to fix it
Implement exponential backoff and retry later; if persistent, check the Safaricom status page or support.
How paylod handles this
paylod manages Daraja OAuth tokens, request signing, and payload formatting for you — the whole class of authentication and malformed-request errors is handled by the wrapper, so you send one clean REST call and get a typed response.
See the paylod M-Pesa API