South African government services downtime warning

The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) has said that it will be upgrading its Centurion data centre from Thursday evening until Sunday, 11 August.

SITA said it chose the long weekend for the downtime to lessen the impact on government services. It will cut the power supply to the facility to upgrade its uninterrupted power supply (UPS) output.

This includes installing four distribution boards and establishing an additional power supply path.

“The upgrade will focus on the UPS output, which will enable continuous distribution of electricity directed especially at critical installations at the facility,” it said.

“The infrastructure upgrade forms part of the plans to build more redundancy and will remove the Single Point of Failure in our UPS power supply and establish an additional power supply path with physically separated electrical distribution boards.”

“This will also help to maintain a high level of power supply reliability for critical computer environments,” it added.

SITA said the downtime will allow for a gradual restoration of the power supply to ensure that each distribution board is installed and tested and everything is reconnected correctly.

It added that the scope of the work has been carefully planned to minimise the impact of service delivery on SITA’s clients, many of whom are government departments.

“SITA has consulted with all impacted client departments for concurrence and coordination as the work undertaken may result in temporary unavailability and/or delays in dispensing services,” it said.

“The relevant client departments will communicate special arrangements put in place for the duration of the downtime.”

SITA apologised to stakeholders who may be adversely affected by the downtime.

“As a major player in the country’s ICT sector, SITA is demonstrating its commitment to deliver improved services to all clients, and in this instance, by upgrading its electrical infrastructure to ensure service reliability,” it said.

Earlier this week the City of Tshwane warned that its Internet-dependent services, including its website, email, electricity vending, and Internet access, wouldn’t be available during the downtime.

It shut down its networking and hosting equipment early to protect it from potential damage.

“During the upgrade process, electricity to the whole SITA data centre will be turned off,” it said.

“This interruption will also affect the City’s own network and server equipment, which are situated inside the SITA hosting facility.”

It noted that some services could be restored sooner, depending on SITA’s progress. The following Internet-related services will be unavailable during the downtime:

• Internet access
• External email delivery
• City of Tshwane public-hosted websites
• Virtual private network access
• Electricity vending
• All other Internet-dependent City of Tshwane services

“ICT Division management apologises for any inconvenience as a result of the downtime. Any changes to the downtime will be communicated to all users and stakeholders in advance,” the metro said in a statement.

The City of Tshwane recently suffered an outage that disabled its IT services, including its vending system for prepaid electricity tokens, on 19 July 2024.

The incident occurred due to an Internet outage on the day caused by a deployment from cybersecurity vendor Crowstrike that caused all Windows PCs using its software to enter a blue screen of death boot loop.

“The City of Tshwane’s Internet connection is down. Residents should please note that all IT-related services, including the prepaid vending system, are not accessible at this time,” it said.

The Crowdstrike incident impacted several other major entities, including Capitec, which restored its services by 10:00 on the day and confirmed the deployment as the cause.

“Since early this morning, clients have faced difficulties accessing various banking services, including online banking, mobile app transactions, and card payments,” it said.

“Our tech team has worked quickly to resolve the problem — we are pleased to report that all our banking has now been fully restored.”