Question NW372 to the Minister of Home Affairs
18 March 2022 - NW372
Roos, Mr AC to ask the Minister of Home Affairs
(a) For what total number of days was the eGazette website offline in the 202021 financial year, (b) for what total number of days was the website offline between 1 April 2021 and 9 February 2022 and (c) given the impact of downtime to court and legislative processes, what contingency processes are in place to ensure that the eGazette website remains online?
Reply:
a) For the said period the Government Printing Works website was never offline.
b) The Government Printing Works website was only offline from 31st January 2022 and restored on 13 February 2022. However, it subsequently went down again from 15 February 2022 to 21 February 2022 due to technical challenges experienced when the physical server on the DMZ which manages the website services crashed. During this period the publishing of the gazettes still continued and gazettes were made available to the public through the following channels:
- Contact Centre accessible through telephone (012) 748 6200 or email: [email protected]
- GPW Bookshop, both hard and soft copies with soft copies requested through [email protected]
The website came back online on the 22nd February 2022 and gazettes are being uploaded
c) During the time when the website was down, GPW ensured that all requested e-Gazettes were sent through to customers per email to avoid service interruptions and ensure business continuity. The channels mentioned in (b) above were used to keep customers updated.
GPW has developed a Business Technology Strategy and Plan that serves to migrate the ICT environment from the old to the new web service infrastructure to avoid a recurrence of the system crashes.
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