Question NW2301 to the Minister of Home Affairs
28 June 2022 - NW2301
Khanyile, Ms AT to ask the Minister of Home Affairs
What number of whole-day downtime was experienced by offices of his department in Stellenbosch over the past two years; (2) what (a) was the total number of work hours lost in the past two years as a result of the downtime at the Stellenbosch office, (b) were the causes of most of the downtime at the office, (c) steps have been taken to reduce and/or eradicate downtime at the office and (d) is the total of the number of hours lost as a result of system downtime at the office in each month over the past two years?
Reply:
1. We consulted with SITA and requested the network outage statistics for the stated period, unfortunately their monitoring systems (eHealth & NMS) overrides data after12 months. According to the attached report from the e-Health system, the office experienced downtime for a whole day on the 29 Nov 2021over the 12-month period 01 June 2021 to 15 June 2022. We have also extracted information from the DHA network monitoring system (Manage Engine). The office experienced downtime on the following days 03/10/2022, 03/23/2022, 04/12/2022, 04/13/2022 and 06/10/2022, see the attached report for detailed downtime information.
The office downtimes would have been due to SITA Switching Centre network outage emanating from Cable Breaks, load shedding, and infrastructure theft in the Stellenbosch area.
2. The office is already running on a 2Mbps fibre optic line. The Department has made stabilisation a top priority. In addition, the department is working closely with SITA to carry out the various commitments made on this matter. A number of these measures were outlined during the recent budget vote speech by the Minister of Home Affairs. See attached summary slide.
END