Big government website outage — Police, Presidency, and National Treasury sites down
Several South African government websites using the gov.za domain are offline and inaccessible, with some sites returning a proxy server error when trying to access them.
Some websites show a simple “This site can’t be reached” message, stating that the particular site took too long to respond, while others return the server caching error.
Websites confirmed to be affected by the outage include:
- South African Police Services — https://www.saps.gov.za/
- The Presidency — https://presidency.gov.za/
- Department of Home Affairs — http://www.dha.gov.za/
- Department of Communications and Digital Technologies — https://www.dcdt.gov.za/
- Department of Higher Education and Training — https://www.dhet.gov.za/
- Department of Trade, Industry and Competition — http://www.thedtic.gov.za/
- Department of Mineral Resources and Energy — https://www.dmr.gov.za/
- Stats SA — https://www.statssa.gov.za/
- Department of Labour — https://www.labour.gov.za/
- Department of Tourism — https://www.tourism.gov.za/
- e-Services — https://www.eservices.gov.za/
- National Treasury — http://www.treasury.gov.za/
MyBroadband tested the sites using other browsers and alternative Internet connections, but they were still inaccessible.
The image below shows an example of the error presented on most of the affected websites.
A few sites using the gov.za domain, including those of Parliament, the South African Revenue Service, and the National Department of Health, appeared to be unaffected by the outage.
Some provincial and metropolitan sites, including Gauteng, Cape Town, Ekhuruleni, and Tshwane, also appear unaffected by the outage.
This is the second time this year South African government websites have been hit by a major outage.
In February, a failure on the primary and backup links at the State IT Agency’s (Sita’s) Cape Town and Centurion centres knocked several government services offline. It took around seven hours to restore.
Sita did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Update – MyBroadband readers have reported that the entire Home Affairs system is down as a result of the outage.
Update (17:30) – A Sita spokesperson told MyBroadband that the incident was caused by an unstable Internet connection from the ISP, in addition to software configuration challenges in the network infrastructure.
“Government internet services have been restored, with testing and confirmations currently underway from national and provincial governments and other organs of the state,” they added.
“Once a root cause report has been shared with us, SITA will consider what steps (with or without the service provider) to take as part of efforts intended to mitigate incidents of this nature.”
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