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A day before President Cyril Ramaphosa is set to deliver the State of the Nation Address (SONA), key national government websites across the country - including Parliament, those of several departments and the SA Police Service - crashed, possibly due to "infrastructure damage".
By late on Wednesday evening, most government websites were restored. However the presidency's website was still down.
State Information Technology Agency (SITA) spokesperson Tlali Tlali said that "acts of vandalism and theft" in the vicinity of Tembisa, on the East Rand, damaged infrastructure, which may have contributed to the outage.
"Part of the information we have received is that there was infrastructure damage. The infrastructure was in the vicinity of incidents of unrest. For the moment we are unable to draw a direct link … between the damage and the protest," he said.
The City of Tshwane said on Twitter that SITA "informed its customers in Gauteng (including City of Tshwane), Mpumalanga, North West and KwaZulu-Natal that its internet primary and secondary links are down."
The city said that "e-services, such as electricity prepaid vending system and other related online services are down, which means that electricity prepaid customers won’t be able to vend." Call centre lines were down as well.
The article has been updated with confirmation of the location of the infrastructure damage, as well as the fact that most websites were restored.
