One day before President Cyril Ramaphosa is due to deliver the State of the Nation (SONA) address, key national government websites across the country, including Parliament, those of various departments and the SA Police Service, they collapsed, possibly due to “infrastructure damage”. .
As of late Wednesday night, most government websites were restored. However, the website of the presidency was still down.
State Information Technology Agency (SITA) spokesman Tlali Tlali said “acts of vandalism and theft” in the vicinity of Tembisa on the East Rand damaged infrastructure, which may have contributed to the outage.
“Part of the information we have received is that there was damage to the infrastructure. The infrastructure was in the vicinity of the riot incidents. At the moment we cannot establish a direct link… between the damage and the protest,” he said.
The city of Tshwane said on Twitter that SITA “has informed its customers in Gauteng (including the city of Tshwane), Mpumalanga, North West and KwaZulu-Natal that their primary and secondary internet links are down.”
The city said that “electronic services such as the prepaid electricity sales system and other related online services are down, which means that prepaid electricity customers will not be able to sell.” Call center lines were also down.
The article has been updated with confirmation of the location of the infrastructure damage, as well as the fact that most of the websites were restored.
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