Warning over massive 55-hour internet downtime for Tshwane and other government sites
Key government websites, such as Stats SA, the Presidency, and the City of Tshwane, will experience downtime over the next three days as the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) upgrades its data centre in Centurion.
SITA will implement a three-day planned maintenance and upgrade of the electrical infrastructure at the Centurion Data Centre scheduled from Thursday, 08 August, at 16h00 until Sunday, 11 August 2024.
“This planned intervention targets the long weekend where disruption to services can be minimised and forms part of SITA’s investment and commitment to enhance service delivery capability of government,” it said.
The upgrade will focus on the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) output which will enable continuous distribution of electricity directed especially at critical installations at the facility.
The details of the planned downtime are listed below:
- Start of Downtime: 08 August 2024, 16h00; Shut down of applications and equipment in sequence.
- Commencement of Electrical Work: 09 August 2024, 00h00
- Restoration of Power (phase 1): 10 August 2024, 08h00
- Restoration of Power (phase 2): 11 August 2024, 06h00
- Gradual restoration of equipment and applications in sequence until 23h00.
The group said the infrastructure upgrade forms part of the plans to build more redundancy and will remove the Single Point of Failure in its UPS power supply and establish an additional power supply path with physically separated electrical distribution boards.
“This will also help to maintain a high level of power supply reliability for critical computer environments,” it said.
The full restoration of all services is expected on Sunday,11 August 2024 at approximately 23h00.
During the maintenance period, some clients who do not have alternative sites that serve as Data Recovery (DR) sites, which are key to ensuring business continuity, may be impacted.
SITA has an approximated number of 37 clients using the SITA Centurion Data Centre as a site for white space.
“The Agency has worked together with other government departments and entities to look at alternative solutions. A case in point is the Department of Home Affairs and the Border Management Agency, for example,” it said.
However, other government sites will be down. One of the biggest is the City of Thswane’s online portals.
Residents have been warned that the following services will be offline during the outage:
- Internet access
- External email delivery
- CoT public hosted websites
- Electricity vending
- All internet-dependent services
- Social media channel enquiries (Twitter and Facebook)
- All billing enquiries
Not all services will be down, but residents will have to use other channels to use them. For example:
- Residents can report power failures via SMS
- Water leaks, pot holes, sewer and other water complaints can still be reported
- Account payments can be made via third party platforms, but will only reflect once systems are back online.
- Prepaid electricity users have been urged to load enough power for the long weekend. While these users can still load up using through third parties – like banking apps and retailers – any issues with tokens can only be resolved once the systems have returned.
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