The system is down — Nationwide Home Affairs outage
Home Affairs’ systems across South Africa are offline, the government department said on Friday.
According to its notice, the outage is due to a cable break connecting the department to the State Information Technology Agency (Sita).
“This cable break means that most Home Affairs services are not available,” it stated.
Passport collections were still available, and the department would issue handwritten death certificates during the downtime.
Computerised death certificates will be issued when the system is back online.
A team of Home Affairs and Sita officials are working to resolve the network issues.
The department apologised for the inconvenience and said it was waiting for Sita to provide an estimated restoration time.
Home Affairs is infamous for its downtime, including reports that corrupt staff deliberately broke systems.
Home Affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi announced in January 2022 that he was looking to root out corruption in his department.
He said he’d heard the sarcastic jokes suggesting he would have to fire two-thirds of the Home Affairs staff to cut out all the corrupt officials.
“If we have to get rid of two-thirds of the department’s officials to clean it up from what it is, then so be it. And that process has started,” the minister stated.
His comments came after he and home affairs director-general Livhuwani Makhode were served with three arrest warrants for contempt of court.
Three senior home affairs officials failed to execute court orders regarding R11 million payouts to junior staff that were meant to have been sacked.
According to the minister, he and Makhode were unaware of the court orders.
Recently, a MyBroadband reader shared his nightmare experience with a Home Affairs-enabled bank branch in Durban North.
He explained that after waiting at his selected bank branch for over two hours, an official came out to call the last six applicants from the previous day.
The official told the rest of the applicants waiting in the queue that the system was offline. His experience has left him uncertain about how — or if — he will receive his passport.
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