From yesterday evening to 09:00 this morning, several government department Web sites were offline, with no clear explanation as to the cause of the downtime.
Some of the sites that were inaccessible include the Presidency, Department of Commutations, Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services, Department of Science and Technology, SA News, Government Communications and Information Service, Department of Home Affairs (DHA), Department of International Relations and Cooperation, and Department of Tourism, to name a few.
This latest incident marks the second downtime for the DHA’s main site in recent months. In April, the home affairs site remained offline for over two weeks following "emergency maintenance" that began on 10 April.
This morning, several ITWeb employees attempted to access different sites via the Google Chrome browser, but clicking through to the sites brought up error messages that either read: “This site can’t be reached” or "The requested URL could not be retrieved".
Downtime for the sites is a familiar occurrence around this time of the year, as ITWeb reported on 10 August 2018 that attempts to access government Web sites were futile.
At the time, ITWeb revealed the government sites hosted by the State IT Agency (SITA) were not affected. However, SITA-hosted sites like the Department of Public Service and Administration, Gauteng Department of Education and Department of Public Works were also down this time around.
The government IT agency has in the past expressed its intentions to consolidate and host all government department Web sites within its own infrastructure.
This move, according to SITA, is to centralise information to make sure it is archived in a central place so that it doesn't fall in fragmented areas where it can be compromised easily.
Spokespeople for the communications ministry and SITA had not responded to ITWeb’s questions at the time of publication.
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