TransUnion Information Regulator

Photo: File

SITA says government website outages not related to cyber attack

“We confirm that there has been an interruption in the provision of Internet service to a number our customers,” said SITA, the government’s IT service provider.

TransUnion Information Regulator

Photo: File

Several government websites are not functioning properly on Friday, 10 September. According to SITA, the South African government maintains that the outages are not related to cyber attacks such as the one that affected Transnet and the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development more recently.

GOVERNMENT WEBSITES DOWN, SITA CONFIRMS

Several of the government’s websites that utilise the gov.za domain were down for most of Friday – the most notable sites affected are the South African government (http://www.gov.za) and South African Police Services (https://www.saps.gov.za/).

When visiting the affected sites the page did not load and eventually the connection timed out. MyBroadband reported that some websites that use the affected domain still functioned properly, including the sites for Parliament, National Treasury, SARS and the Department of Health. Some provincial websites – the Western Cape and Gauteng – also worked.

The spokesperson for the government’s IT service provider, State Information Technology Agency (SITA), Tlali Tlali, told MyBroadband and News24 that the outage was related to a damaged fibre cable and not a cyber attack.

“We confirm that there has been an interruption in the provision of Internet service to a number our customers,” said Tlali.

“SITA would like to apologise to its customers and the public for the inconvenience occasioned by this service interruption.”

Tlali said technicians were working on the problem and the websites would be restored as soon as possible.