Government said it’s working to restore access to a number of state websites that were hit by an outage on Monday.

Websites including those of the presidency, national treasury and the department of mineral resources & energy’s were all inaccessible.

“The State IT Agency (Sita) has experienced some systems challenges,” William Baloyi, a spokesman for the Government Communication Information System, said by phone. “It should be online again soon.”

TechCentral attempted to access a wide range of government websites at 4pm on Monday, including the main gov.za portal as well as the departments of communications & digital technologies and labour and the South African Police Service. All were inaccessible at the time of writing.

One website that was available was that of the South African Social Security Agency.

“We confirm that a number of our customers experienced network and connectivity outages earlier today and the matter is receiving attention,” Sita spokesman Tlali Tlali said in e-mailed response to a query from TechCentral about the downtime.

Fibre breaks

“Sita has primary and secondary links for both Cape Town and Centurion centres, an indication that we have redundancy in place. The service provider has however experienced failure on both the primary and secondary links, and this has affected a number of Internet-related services,” Tlali explained.

He said Sita contacted its service provider to send teams to attend to the incident to restore services. Three teams have been dispatched to test physical fibre infrastructure at locations in Bryanston, Teraco (in Isando) and Centurion. “The teams found two breaks on secondary link testing from the Teraco location.

“We apologise for the inconvenience caused to the customers and the public by extension – we fully understand the impact such outages have on service delivery and access to government information. The matter will be prioritised with the service provider to explore possible solutions and interventions to mitigate the impact on service delivery and customer inconvenience,” Tlali said. — (c) 2022 NewsCentral Media, with additional reporting (c) 2022 Bloomberg LP