Big updates and changes for EskomSePush
EskomSePush (ESP) has released significant updates and changes in 2025 to remain relevant to communities in South Africa, with load-shedding having all but disappeared.
ESP co-founder Herman Maritz told MyBroadband that 2025 had been a strange year to run a load-shedding app.
There have been only eight days of load-shedding in 2025, compared with 68 days in 2024 and 284 days in 2023.
However, he and fellow founder Dan Southwood-Wells are not hoping for the power cuts to return. “We never set out to build a tool that depends on South Africa suffering,” he said
The breathing room afforded by the load-shedding reprieve has allowed the team to continue the app’s pivot towards an interactive community notice board and support system centred around ESP Chats.
With ESP Version 5, the app was quietly rewired around actual suburbs and areas rather than legacy load-shedding blocks.
“Load-shedding still works exactly the same, but now your schedule, local chats and outage reports all live under the same place name: the place you actually live, work and complain about,” Maritz said.
Some of the advantages of using ESP Chats over other popular apps, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, include your phone number remaining private and the absence of moderator “despots”.
“In the background, AI does the first-pass moderation and summarises so you don’t have to scroll through 300 ‘I’m looking for a job’ replies,” Maritz said.
By adapting the product to everyday local life so that others can share info and build connections even when it’s inconvenient, the app has built up a large and loyal following outside of load-shedding.
“On quiet days without load-shedding, ESP sits at around 300,000 daily users, which we’re very chuffed about,” Maritz said.
“Big local weather events, and water or electricity outages can push the average to roughly 500,000 daily users.”
A notable example was the Pretoria East outage on 18 February 2025, where an explosion at the Njala substation triggered a surge in ESP traffic and local video uploads.
Traffic down — but engagement surges
On the Google Play Store alone, total ESP downloads increased from 8.8 million at the start of 2025 to 9.8 million in early December 2025.
It also boasts a commendable 4.69 rating based on over 230,000 reviews. “We still see tens of thousands of new installs every month,” Maritz said.
The highest number of users ESP saw during the year was 3.2 million in February, when stage 6 load-shedding briefly returned.
Although user traffic has calmed down significantly, Maritz said current users were more deeply engaged in local chats and outage threads.
“We’re seeing more first-time chatters and more replies being marked as helpful, which suggests people aren’t just lurking; they’re actually helping each other,” he said.
“ESP Chats is now the default way people check on any local issue: electricity faults, water interruptions, load reduction, fibre cuts, dead traffic lights, you name it.”
In terms of new features and enhancements, ESP is working on the following:
- Richer Area Pages or “area Wikipedias” — One page per suburb for load-shedding, load reduction, municipal faults, and key local events.
- Better maps and context — Enabling users to see who else nearby is affected, not just when they are personally affected.
- Service Delivery Insights — Simple user-friendly statistics page showing how often an area has unplanned outages, how long they tend to last, and how things are changing over time.
ESP also plans to open source some of its map data so others can build “cool stuff,” Maritz said. “Our crowdsourced outage API with the map data is now a meaningful part of the business.”
He also said that they would keep expanding the app so utilities and businesses can react faster when things break.”
Maritz said that the year had proved there was a real need for accurate, local, community-driven information.
“Our job now is to keep ESP useful, fast and friendly in that world with less panic and more ‘I know what’s going on, and I know my neighbours have my back’,” he said.
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