Johnathan Paoli
THE Home Affairs Department has confirmed that its systems are down following a technical glitch on the State Information Technology Agency mainframe.
There was a partial crash on Wednesday, slowing access to the National Population Register, the department said in a statement.
This means citizens are currently unable to access some services, including passports and identity documents applications.
Home Affairs deputy minister Njabulo Nzuza said technicians and engineers are scrambling to get the system back online.
Nzuza said that the technicians have been working overnight and that it looked positive, however, it continued to give the department problems on Thursday morning in terms of being slow in live capture, which made the processing of transactions very slow resulting in the system not processing transactions as it was supposed to.
Nzuza said while some services are running, it’s unclear how long the current down time will take.
“It’s not a total collapse of the system; it’s just that the system is not processing systems on time so that is what is affecting some of the collections but we are working on the issue and we should be able to resolve it soon,” Nzuza said.
Department spokesperson Siya Qoza said the issue affected home affairs offices across the country, but that he hoped the matter would be resolved soon.
Qoza said that the department was in contact with the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) and sought a speedy resolution to the problem.
The spokesperson said that the department wished to apologise to citizens and clients for the inconvenience that has been caused by the outage.
This follows a technical glitch last year in Postbank’s payment systems which left thousands of Sassa grant recipients, including pensioners, unable to collect their money.
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