The State IT Agency (SITA) cannot comment on the nature or extent of a fault which resulted in numerous government Web sites going offline last week, “due to security issues”.
Affected Web sites included large portions of government's primary landing portal (www.gov.za) and information hub (www.Info.gov.za). These sites provide critical public access to a variety of documents considered to be of significant interest or importance to the country's citizens, including speeches and statements, tender bulletins, events and the latest documents to be published for comment.
Various national, provincial, local and parastatal sites also experienced downtime, including the departments of transport, science and technology, and home affairs; Limpopo's provincial government site; several departments within the Gauteng provincial government; a number of municipalities; and parastatals or government bodies like the Public Service Commission.
The corresponding IP addresses of the sites confirmed these to be hosted with SITA. SITA's own Web site did not appear to be impacted by the fault.
SITA's acting GM of corporate communications, Amitha Ramlal, declined to reveal exactly how many government Web sites under its management were impacted by the fault. She also declined to reveal whether the fault was limited to the Web sites alone, or extended to the accompanying mail servers.
Try again later
ITWeb first experienced the fault on two government Web sites on the evening of Friday, 15 April. Subsequent attempts to access the sites over that weekend persistently delivered unsuccessful results. By Sunday morning, 17 April, it was evident the issue was not confined to the initial sites as the list of offline government sites lengthened considerably.
Ramlal says SITA began working on the problem at 3am on Monday, 18 April. “The technical problem with the database server of GCIS [Government Communication Information System], which runs the .gov domain, was resolved at 5am the following morning. All data were successfully recovered [sic].”
SITA declined to clarify whether the issue with the database server was of a hardware or software nature. Instead, Ramlal has assured the issue has been “adequately dealt with”.
However, Ramlal admitted the organisation is still “working with the relevant service provider to determine the root cause of the problem in order to put in place preventative measures”. SITA declined to name the service provider, vendor or technology involved in the matter.
Ramlal says the organisation is unable to provide more detail “due to security issues”.
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