SA Airways acting CEO Chris Smyth has issued a public apology for the downtime on its high-profile e-commerce website at the weekend. The website was suspended after the domain name, flysaa.com, was not renewed on time by the airline’s service providers.

The flysaa.com website was unavailable between 7pm on Saturday and midday on Sunday, the airline says.

Smyth’s letter, which has been published on the flysaa.com website, says the outage “was not as a result of any oversight by SAA or its personnel, [and] nor was it due to cyber attacks. The problem was a direct result of service providers not meeting their obligations and SAA will be taking further action in this regard.”

Smyth’s letter is carried below:

Dear valued Flysaa customer ,

We apologise for any inconvenience caused to our customers over the weekend when our website and online booking facility flysaa.com was taken off the Internet.

This outage was not as a result of any oversight by SAA or its personnel, nor was it due to cyber attacks.   The problem was a direct result of service providers not meeting their obligations and SAA will be taking further action in this regard.

Unfortunately, SAA did not receive any pre-warning of the pending issue. But within hours of the problem being identified, the SAA IT personnel were able to address the problem, ensuring minimal disruption to our customers.

Due to the nature of the problem and the way in which the Internet works, it took some time before the rectification was propagated to all Internet service providers. This explains why our customers experienced differing intervals of outage time.

We would like to assure you that at no time did this issue affect any of our daily operations and that the only impact experienced was to flysaa.com and its availability to the public.

Chris Smyth , acting CEO,  SAA