City Power says it has managed to clear and restore most of its information technology systems, including the pre-paid electricity vending system. This means that most customers will now be able to buy electricity.
News24 reported earlier that scores of Johannesburg residents using pre-paid electricity meters were unable to purchase electricity or even load that which they had already bought, due a cyber attack in which a virus had been planted in City Power's networks.
According to a City Power statement, the ransomware virus compromised City Power’s database and other software.
"City Power cyber security is currently investigating the cause of this attack," the utility's spokesperson Isaac Mangena said.
"We want to assure residents of Johannesburg that City Power systems were able to proactively intercept this and managed to deal with it quicker."
"Customers should also not panic, as none of their details were compromised," Mangena added.
He said that work was continuing on some systems and applications that were affected, including the uploading of suppliers' invoices and the logging of faults by customers on the website.
"This also affected our response time to logged calls, as some of internal systems to dispatch and order material have been slowed by the impact."
In the meantime, City Power has asked customers to log faults, using their cellphones to log into their mobile website, www.citypower.mobi, while suppliers seeking to submit invoices for payments should rather bring their invoices physically to the City Power offices in Booysens.
"We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused to the people of the City of Johannesburg. If everything goes well, we should have everything back by the end of Thursday."
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