Tshwane Internet outage takes out all IT services

The City of Tshwane has informed residents that its Internet connection is down, preventing customers from using any of its IT-related services.

This includes the prepaid vending system, blocking any City of Tshwane-fed customers from topping up their electricity units.

It made the announcement via a post on X (formerly Twitter).

“The City of Tshwane’s Internet connection is down. Residents should please note that all IT-related services, including the prepaid vending system, are not accessible at this time,” it said.

“Technicians are attending to the problem.”

While it hasn’t revealed the cause of the outage, it could be the result of a global problem caused by cybersecurity platform provider Crowdstrike.

The company confirmed the issue on Friday morning. It said a “content deployment” issue resulted in Windows computers worldwide entering a Blue Screen of Death boot loop.

Crowdstrike also provided a workaround for system administrators. However, technicians must have physical access to affected machines to fix each one individually.

It affected major services and companies overseas, including airlines, airports, emergency services, and the London Stock Exchange. In South Africa, Capitec was offline for several hours.

Capitec announced by 10:00 on Friday that it had restored its services to full functionality. It confirmed that the Crowdstrike patch caused the issues.

“Since early this morning, clients have faced difficulties accessing various banking services, including online banking, mobile app transactions, and card payments,” it said.

“Our tech team has worked quickly to resolve the problem — we are pleased to report that all our banking has now been fully restored.”

Reports of widespread Windows issues came after Microsoft resolved a cloud services outage that had impacted US flight operations on Thursday, 18 July 2024.

It resolved the cloud services issue at around 07:00 SA time. Around that time, some users reported problems accessing Microsoft 365 cloud services.

Microsoft confirmed the 365 outage on its cloud status page, saying users could experience problems accessing various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

“A configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections,” it said.