South Africa’s R744,000 DigiTech website is broken

The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies’ (DCDT’s) DigiTech website, which cost R744,000 to create, has been offline for nearly two weeks.

The beginning of its downtime coincided with several other .gov.za websites going down, including the SANews, Labour.gov.za, and DCDT.gov.za pages.

The State Information Technology Agency (Sita) told MyBroadband that the outage resulted from primary Internet connections at the Centurion and Cape Town points of presence (PoP) becoming unstable.

“Sita’s Service Provider repaired a bend in a fibre connecting to the Cape Town PoP, and the Centurion link was also stabilised. Service improvement discussions are currently taking place between SITA and the Internet Service Provider,” it said.

However, the Digitech.gov.za website is still down and returns an error.

“This site can’t be reached. www.digitech.gov.za unexpectedly closed the connection,” it reads.

MyBroadband asked the DCDT about the cause of the downtime and when it expects the website to return to service, but it didn’t immediately answer our questions.

Former communications minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni launched the website in May 2022 to celebrate World Telecommunications and Information Society Day.

She said the platform would serve as a digital distribution service developed, maintained, and operated by the South African government.

“The platform allows users to browse and download apps developed across operating systems,” said Ntshavheni.

However, the department quickly received backlash for the website’s poor design and lack of critical elements.

Former Democratic Alliance (DA) spokesperson for telecommunications and digital technologies Solly Malatsi described the website as looking like it could have been developed by a high schooler.

He highlighted the lack of download links and sufficient information about the digital products available at launch.

Instead, it offers download or app store links and very basic and short product descriptions, if any.

“This falls woefully short of what the Department promised for this website, and indicates a serious lack of skill in its design and construction,” said Malatsi.

He likened the DigiTech project to the Free State website scandal in 2013 when it was revealed that the province’s government had spent R40 million developing it.

In May 2023, communications minister Mondli Gungubele revealed that the DigiTech website had been redesigned at a cost of nearly R744,000, prompting more backlash from the DA.

Mondli Gungubele, South African Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies

“The old Digitech website did not meet DCDT specifications,” the minister said.

He said the DCDT had launched the redesigned site on 30 March 2023.

“The security of the new Digitech site has been enhanced, and new design has been implemented,” added Gungubele.

The DigiTech website appears to have received another slight redesign in the form of a visual update. However, little else has been done to improve it.

In May 2024, MyBroadband spotted that various visual elements on the website had changed colour to resemble the South African government’s colour scheme more closely.

While the site looks slightly better, it is still sluggish and error-prone.

Design-wise, the DCDT has changed the website’s banners to a green matching the colour on South Africa’s coat of arms, while certain headings have changed to an orange colour similar to that of the coat of arms’ crown.

However, we encountered various errors while navigating the site and product listings that lacked icons and sufficient descriptions.

Furthermore, the website is designed to promote locally developed digital products via the DigiTech Marketplace, but it still doesn’t provide any method to purchase or download the products.

It doesn’t even include links to where you might access apps online or download them from the Google Play marketplace or Apple App Store.

This is despite the nearly R744,000 redesign that came after Malatsi highlighted that the platform was lacking these elements.

One of the many errors experienced when navigating the Digitech website