The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) says its systems are back online, following a nationwide outage on Friday.
The network outage, caused by a cable breakage, limited home affairs services to passport collections and handwritten death certificates for burial purposes, with the department saying computerised certificates will only be issued when the system is back online.
In a statement, the DHA says, together with the State Information Technology Agency (SITA), it has fixed the cable breakage that impacted service delivery on 1 April.
Home affairs services have been restored, it states.
Home affairs minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi has instructed the department to extend operating hours to ensure all clients that visited the offices on Friday are served.
"Minister Motsoaledi said the department owed it to the public to extend operating hours to compensate for the unfortunate network failure incident," reads the statement.
"The department will open until 18:30 on Monday, 4 April 2022, and everyone who is in the office by this time will be assisted."
The DHA – whose core function is to manage identity, civil status and migration of citizens – often suffers downtime, with the blame placed on government IT agency SITA’s doorstep.
To improve its systems and services, the home affairs department has embarked on a modernisation process, which it hopes will address challenges such as queues and network downtime.
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