The Department of Home Affairs wishes to clarify occurrences of service interruptions at some of our offices around the country in the past two weeks.
On Monday, 27 October 2014, the Home Affairs New Cooperation Building, which hosts our critical systems, experienced a power failure due to a water pipe burst at the Pretoria City Hall which left electricity cables and panels submerged in water at the Hall's substation causing a power failure in some parts of the Pretoria central business district (CBD).
The power outage lasted for three days leading the department to switch over to the Disaster Recovery Site which is hosted at State Information Technology Agency (SITA). In the same week (Thursday, 30 October 2014) SITA’s Centurion site also experienced a power failure that affected both the Live Capture and the HANIS Systems of the Department of Home Affairs. The effect of the SITA power outage has left the HANIS system with damages in our server which disabled some parts of the services.
The department will endeavor to bring services to normality by Monday.
We continue to work in close co-operation with SITA to ensure that a speedy resolution to this matter. In this regard, the Department of Home Affairs reiterates its commitment to serving South Africans through the provision of enabling documents and apologises for inconveniences caused as a result of these unfortunate incidents.
For media enquiries kindly contact:
Mayihlome Tshwete
Cell: 072 869 2477
