Outages have brought government IT services down twice in the last week: the first caused by power failures and the second by poor continuity processes.
The State IT Agency (SITA) network was down for most of the working day on Friday 10 August, from 08h00 to 14h30, when power in the Centurion area failed.
On Monday 13 August, the system was down again, from 10h05 to 11h40.
“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,” says SITA CEO Dr Setumo Mohapi.
Following the long outage on Friday, systems were switched to backup power and failed to switch back when power was restored. When the batteries ran down on Monday, the Broadband Infraco transmission equipment failed, bringing the network down again.
“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,” Dr Mohapi says.
He has issued an apology for the outages.
“SITA will concurrently investigate both incidents as a single occurrence – to get behind the cause of the problem. 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.”