Department website manager Zolile Somkhence said the message was put up by their website developer to see if the page was working. <\/p>\n
"When the website was up and running they forgot to delete that page," Somkhence said. <\/p>\n
He said they would not take action against the company, Simo Solutions, as it was 'also our responsibility to check on the error message when we maintain the website'. <\/p>\n
"I can see the person who wrote the message just did it for a laugh," Somkhence said. <\/p>\n
The message told visitors that the page was down for a variety of reasons, some of which read: <\/p>\n
l The page is on holiday and will be out of the office until next week or when it feels like coming back; <\/p>\n
1. The page was considered redundant and was given a raise so it now works even less; <\/p>\n
2. The page performed an illegal operation and was promoted to vice-president; <\/p>\n
3. The page was on strike. We are busy negotiating with the unions now for better wages so it can come online; <\/p>\n
4. The page is running late. This could be because the taxis need to collect at least another 404 passengers, and <\/p>\n
5. The page is sleeping. After all, this is African time we are talking about. <\/p>\n
East London-based Simo Solutions sales and marketing director Zakhe Madala confirmed the mistake. <\/p>\n
"In order for the developers to check the functionality of the site they just populate it with irrelevant information to check that it works. <\/p>\n
"This was the case with the error message, and unfortunately it was not deleted when the site was handed over to the department in 2006." <\/p>\n
Madala said the person who came up with the message had a 'sense of humour'. <\/p>\n
"He's very apologetic; we all are. We apologise to the department for any inconvenience this may have caused. <\/p>\n
It was simply an oversight. The page has since been removed. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The prank error message that recently appeared on the Eastern Cape Department of Health website was in fact a test page created by the website developer, which hadn’t been deleted. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}