ICASA website suffers outage

The website of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) suffered a temporary outage at the end of the weekend.
Several MyBroadband forum members pointed out that they were unable to access the site on Sunday 10 January.
The issue persisted on Monday morning, as attempting to open the icasa.org.za web page via the Chrome browser presented a “This site can’t be reached” error message.
Later, accessing the website showed a “404 Not Found” error, which is typically provided when a URL or its content was moved or deleted.
The website was once again accessible by 10:00 on Monday morning. It is not clear what caused the ICASA website outage.
The 404 error message is used to indicate that communication with a specific server was successful, but the server was unable to locate the requested information.
In certain cases, the error is employed when a server does not want to divulge whether it has the requested information.
It may also be caused by errors on the side of the web administrators.
MyBroadband contacted ICASA for comment on the issue, but the authority did not provide a response by the time of publication.
The image below shows the error message when attempting to access the ICASA website as of 08:50 on Monday 11 January.
Update – Monday 10:53
ICASA Head of Communications Paseka Maleka has explained that the outage was caused by service work performed at ICASA’s data centre.
“The ICASA website is hosted on-premise i.e in the ICASA data centre,” Maleka noted.
“Yesterday morning, the UPS in the server room was being serviced and it appears that the service technicians may have tripped the power circuit feeding the DMZ server.”
“The DMZ has since been restarted and the ICASA website is up and running again from 09:37 on Monday, 11 Jan 2021,” Maleka added.