Major government website outage — Home Affairs, Police, and National Treasury sites offline

3 years ago 1

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Several of South Africa’s government websites with the gov.za domain are down and return DNS address and timeout errors when trying to access them.

This includes the Department of Home Affairs’ online booking platform for smart ID cards and passport applications.

MyBroadband tested several gov.za sites, all of which returned either a DNS address or a timeout error. These sites include:

Main SA Government site — https://www.gov.za/
Department of Communications and Digital Technologies — https://www.dcdt.gov.za/
Department of Mineral Resources and Energy — https://www.dmr.gov.za/
Department of Employment and Labour — https://www.labour.gov.za/
The Presidency — https://presidency.gov.za/
South African Police Services — https://www.saps.gov.za/
SANews — https://www.sanews.gov.za
The National Treasury — http://www.treasury.gov.za/

Further testing revealed that most websites with the gov.za domain are down.

Some sites, including the national administration traffic information system (Natis) — including its online portal — and Parliament websites, which both use the gov.za domain, remain unaffected by the outage.

MyBroadband tested the sites using other browsers and alternative Internet connections, but they were still inaccessible.

This is the fourth website outage the gov.za domain has suffered since February 2022.

On 27 November 2022, scheduled downtime at Sita data centres took more than 30 government websites down.

A Sita spokesperson told MyBroadband that the downtime was required to execute maintenance and upgrades to allow the systems better handle load-shedding.

In July 2022, several government websites using the domain returned proxy server errors when trying to access them, while others showed a simple “This site can’t be reached” message.

The outage was widespread, but interestingly, it also didn’t impact Natis and Parliament’s websites.

On 14 February 2022, several South African national government websites were knocked offline, including those of the Home Affairs, SAPS, Mineral Resources and Energy, Post Office, and transport departments.

The outage was caused by a failure on both Sita’s primary and secondary links for its Cape Town and Centurion centres.

MyBroadband contacted Sita for comment, but it had not responded by the time of publication.

Update (16:39) — Sita provided News24 with comment on the outage, saying the agency is aware that the websites are offline.

“Part of the information we have received is that there was infrastructure damage. The infrastructure was in the vicinity of incidents of unrest. For the moment we are unable to draw a direct link … between the damage and the protest,” News24 quoted Sita spokesperson Tlali Tlali as saying.

“However, teams have been dispatched … and once the teams have done their inspection, it can be pointed out whether the damage was deliberate or collateral damage from the unrest.”