Government Printing Works website offline after hardware failure
A month-long outage of the Government Printing Works website was caused by a hardware failure, marketing and stakeholder relations chief Bonakele Mbhele has told MyBroadband.
The outage began on the weekend of 15–16 January 2022, with the website giving the error message — “Cannot connect to the configuration database.”
In recent weeks, the site was brought online for a few hours with limited functionality, only to be taken offline again.
During one brief period, the site was online but only had government gazettes dating up to December 2021 listed in its eGazettes section.
“The Government Printing Works regrettably had a hardware failure, which affected the infrastructure component hosting our website,” Mbhele said.
“Our technical team is in the process of restoring our web services.”
Mbhele previously told MyBroadband that the Government Printing Works envisaged that the site would be operational by 10 February. However, this did not happen.
MyBroadband has contacted the Government Printing Works (GPW) for an update on the problems with its website.
MyBroadband also contacted the original developers of the website. Intervate was a division of T-Systems that has since been integrated into Gijima.
“Intervate stopped web support just after it built the site and handed over to GPW — this was back when Intervate existed as part of T-Systems,” a Gijima spokesperson told MyBroadband.
“Gijima, therefore, cannot comment further on the issue of the GPW website as this does not form part of services rendered to the entity.”
In addition to the Government Printing Works outage, the government’s “Green Gazette” has also not been updated since 28 January 2022.
This is a significant concern for the press, engaged citizens, and civil society, as the Government Gazette is the authoritative source of information on new laws and policies being developed in South Africa.
DA home affairs spokesperson Angel Khanyile issued a statement on Thursday saying that they will write to Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, the Minister of Home Affairs, regarding the problems with the Government Printing Works website.
“It is simply shocking that government would allow this to happen,” Khanyile stated.
“The Gazette needs to be easily accessible to ensure that all citizens know the laws of the country and make informed decisions regarding their conduct.
“This failure by government to ensure that South Africans are kept informed damages the very heart of the relationship between State and citizen.”
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