The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) is investigating the recent network outages that affected government services.
“While the investigation is being done; SITA will immediately work to improve all its incident recovery procedures – and take these two extraordinary incidences - as a new and real learning curve,” SITA Chief Executive Officer Dr Setumo Mohapi said in a statement.
On Monday, service delivery at some government departments was affected due to the network being down from 10am till 11:40am.
“While services were restored, SITA is deeply concerned by these unprecedented network outages – noting especially that it has happened over the past two working days - when citizens require services from government,” Mohapi said.
The SITA Centurion site is a national key point that houses SITA’s Network Operation Centre, and is at the heart of the government network.
“The engineering report received today indicated that 1hr 35 minute outage; is related to the first power outage that happened on Friday in Centurion; due to the Eskom power failure. On Friday, the networks were down during the peak hours from 8am till 2:30pm.
“This morning (Monday: 13 August 2018) the Broadband Infraco (BBI) transmission equipment; inside the SITA Centurion Switching Centre which had been running on battery power since the power outage on Friday; was depleted,” Mohapi said.
SITA engineers are currently investigating why the transmission system failed to switch back to the standard power grid which would be the standard operating procedure.
“SITA sincerely apologises to all government departments; and citizens for the inconvenience caused during this time. SITA also wants to assure government and the public; that we are determined to comprehensively investigate these two related - but unprecedented incidents - to ensure that government and citizens don’t experience this situation in the future,” he said. – SAnews.gov.za
