The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) has revealed that 13 867 production hours were lost at its front offices due to system downtime during the 2025/26 financial year.
The latest figures represent a 61% improvement, compared to the 35 426 hours lost in the 2024/25 financial year, according to the DHA.
This information came to light in a written Parliamentary response to a question from Economic Freedom Fighters MP Thapelo Mogale, who queried the time lost due to system downtime since minister Dr Leon Schreiber assumed office on 30 June 2024.
Home Affairs has described system downtime as operating/business hours lost, rather than simply adding up 24-hour periods in which a system was unavailable.
It notes that monitoring tools measure incidents separately across networks, infrastructure, applications, biometric platforms, the National Population Register (NPR) and external service providers.
The tools do not yet measure the availability of a service across the complete transaction path, from the office or citizen-facing channel through all underlying systems and integrations, as per the department.
In the response, the DHA also notes the reported NPR-related hours lost reached 11 479, during the period under review. It represents a 22% improvement, compared to the previous financial year’s 14 720 hours.
“The department is implementing an end-to-end service observability capability to measure whether services are available and functional across networks, infrastructure, applications, integrations and citizen-facing channels. This will enable accurate reporting of service availability, incident duration, affected offices and the underlying causes of downtime.”
From a provincial perspective, the highest recorded downtime hours were in North West (2 460), Gauteng (2 296) and KwaZulu-Natal (2 291).
“All nine provinces recorded an improvement in general front-office system downtime compared with 2024/25,” according to the department.
For NPR-related downtime, the highest 2025/26 figures were recorded in Limpopo (3 707), KwaZulu-Natal (2 101) and North West (1 562).
The DHA has historical experience of interruptions and network downtime, with the blame sometimes placed on government IT agency the State IT Agency’s (SITA’s) doorstep.
Furthermore, the DHA – whose core function is to manage the identity, civil status and migration of citizens – has to contend with snaking queues at branches and the illegal practice of blocking slots in queues to resell to members of the public, among other issues.
However, the department indicates it has implemented and is progressing a comprehensive systems-resilience programme.
This includes network upgrades and SITA improvements, whereby the agency has upgraded its internal core network and is modernising data centre facilities to reduce multiple points of failure.
In addition, a total of 182 offices were migrated from the legacy desktop client to service manager web, with the remaining offices being fast-tracked. HANIS, AIX and Live Capture redundancy are also being strengthened, it indicates.
“The SITA service level was upgraded from bronze to silver; 226 links were migrated to fibre and 12 to LTE. The remaining 69 Diginet links are being replaced, offices are being upgraded to 50Mbps and dual links are being introduced. The department and SITA are assessing migration towards a 99.999% availability service level,” it states.
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