Over 30 government websites down — including police and home affairs

3 years ago 1

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At least 34 government-run websites in South Africa were offline in what appeared to be a major outage early on Sunday, 27 November 2022.

Attempting to open one of these websites between 06:00 and 08:00 AM presented a “This site can’t be reached” message, accompanied by a “DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN” error.

The latter indicates that the domain name system (DNS), basically the Internet’s equivalent of a phone book, could not resolve a website’s URL into an IP address.

Among the many websites that were offline at the time of publication were the main national government site (gov.za), police (saps.gov.za), Home Affairs (dha.gov.za), and national treasury (treasury.gov.za).

Government departments that appeared not to be impacted by the problem included the National Department of Health (health.gov.za), the Department of Justice (justice.gov.za), and the State Security Agency (ssa.gov.za).

The Department of Defence’s website was also available, but it used a different subdomain — mil.za. Interestingly, its website was not HTTPS-encrypted.

The non-departmental websites of some arms of government, like Sars (sars.gov.za) and Sassa (sassa.gov.za), were also available, but not that of the Investigative Police Directorate (ipid.gov.za).

On local government level, at least one municipal gov.za website — the City of Tshwane’s (tshwane.gov.za) — was also down.

But the gov.za websites of other major metros — including the City of Joburg, City of Cape Town, Ekurhuleni, and Ethekwini — were not affected.

It was unclear when precisely the outage started, as we could immediately find any complaints about the problems on Twitter.

MyBroadband asked Sita — the government’s main IT services provider — about the cause of the outage and whether it was working to resolve it.

It had not responded to our query by the time of publication. Sita’s own website (www.sita.co.za) was also down on Sunday morning.

The list below shows all of the government-run websites MyBroadband confirmed to be offline at the time of publication.

National government (gov.za)
City of Tshwane (tshwane.gov.za)
Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (dalrrd.gov.za)
Department of Basic Education (education.gov.za)
Department of Communication and Digital Technologies (dcdt.gov.za)
Department of Correctional Services (dcs.gov.za)
Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (cogta.co.za)
Department of Employment and Labour (labour.gov.za)
Department of Forestries, Fisheries, and the Environment (dffe.gov.za)
Department of Higher Education and Training (dhet.gov.za)
Department of Home Affairs (dha.gov.za)
Department of Human Settlements (dhs.gov.za)
Department of International Relations and Co-operation (dirco.gov.za)
Department of Military Veterans (dmv.gov.za)
Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (dmre.gov.za)
Department of Public Enterprises (dpe.gov.za)
Department of Public Services and Administration (dpsa.gov.za)
Department of Public Works and Infrastructure (publicworks.gov.za)
Department of Science and Innovation (dst.gov.za)
Department of Small Business Development (dsbd.gov.za)
Department of Social Development (dsd.gov.za)
Department of Sports, Arts, and Culture (dpsa.gov.za)
Department of Tourism (tourism.gov.za)
Department of Trade, Industry, and Co-operation (dtic.gov.za)
Department of Transport (transport.gov.za)
Department of Water and Sanitation (dws.gov.za)
Department of Women, Youth, and Persons with Disabilities (dwypd.gov.za)
E-services (eservices.gov.za)
Government Communication and Information System (gcis.gov.za)
Independent Police Investigative Directorate (ipid.gov.za)
National Treasury (treasury.gov.za)
South African Police Service (saps.gov.za)
Statistics South Africa (statssa.gov.za)
The Presidency (presidency.gov.za)

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Over 30 government websites down — including police and home affairs

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