Firewall change takes down police network

The State Information Technology Agency (Sita) has confirmed an outage that took down internal and public-facing online services of the South African Police Service (Saps) on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Among the outage’s impacts were the Saps website being inaccessible and police officers having to register cases by hand.

Sita head of corporate affairs Tlali Tlali said the problem occurred just after 22:00 on Tuesday, 16 January 2024, after which the agency immediately dispatched its technical teams to investigate.

“The incident resulted in disruptions in services that include email, Internet, intranet, virtual private networks (VPNs) and applications,” Sita stated.

Following troubleshooting, the agency determined that the root cause of the outage was related to maintenance carried out by one of its service providers, which Tlali would not name.

“There was a change in the configuration of the firewall,” Sita said. “The maintenance was not done in a change-controlled environment and in accordance with the protocols.”

Tlali said this adjustment blocked communication between the domain controllers and the Exchange servers, resulting in the outage.

Tlali added that Sita had already restored 90% of services including email, VPN, and Internet access, and was confident that it would be able to restore all services “soon”.

In the interim, it made alternative arrangements for the client to access some services.

As of 16:00 on Wednesday, the Saps website was back online.

Tlali said that the necessary action and improvement interventions was being taken with the service provider to prevent the recurrence of this type of incident.

Update — Services fully restored

Tlali notified MyBroadband that all the affected services were restored by Wednesday afternoon.