The Department of Home Affairs’ (DHA’s) systems are offline nationwide, it said in a statement today.
This, says the DHA, means most of its services are not available.
According to the DHA, the outage was caused by a cable breakage, which connects to the State Information Technology Agency (SITA).
“Due to this network outage, home affairs services are currently limited to passport collections, and handwritten death certificates will be issued for burial purposes, with computerised certificates to be issued when the system is back online.”
The department further states that a team of home affairs and SITA technicians is “working tirelessly” to ensure the cable breakage is resolved.
“We are waiting for SITA to give us information on the estimated time of restoration of the system.
“We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this unfortunate network failure,” it states.
The DHA – whose core function is to manage identity, civil status and migration of citizens – often suffers downtime, with the blame placed on government IT agency SITA’s doorstep.
To improve its systems and services, the home affairs department has embarked on a modernisation process, which it hopes will address challenges such as queues and network downtime.
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