Downtime issues persist at Home Affairs

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) reported a significant reduction in system downtime hours during the 2025/26 financial year, with 13,867 production hours lost, marking a 61% improvement from the 35,426 hours lost in the previous year. This data was disclosed in response to a Parliamentary query regarding system downtime since Minister Dr Leon Schreiber's appointment in June 2024.

Home Affairs defines downtime as lost front-office operational hours, rather than simply counting 24-hour periods of unavailability. The department uses specialized monitoring tools to track incidents across various systems, including networks, infrastructure, applications, biometric platforms, the National Population Register (NPR), and external service providers.

However, these tools are yet to measure the overall availability of a service throughout its entire transaction path from office or citizen-facing channels through all underlying systems and integrations.

NPR-related system downtime hours dropped by 22%, from 14,720 to 11,479, compared to the previous year. Provincial statistics indicate that the North West, Gauteng, and KwaZulu-Natal provinces recorded the highest downtime hours in 2025/26. All provinces, however, showed improvements in front-office system downtime compared to the 2024/25 financial year.

The DHA has a history of dealing with network interruptions, which have sometimes been attributed to the State IT Agency (SITA). The department is actively implementing a comprehensive systems-resilience program, which includes upgrading the internal network, modernizing data centers, and migrating 182 offices from the legacy desktop client to a service manager web system.

Additionally, SITA's service level has been upgraded from bronze to silver, with 226 links migrated to fiber and 12 to LTE, while the remaining 69 Diginet links are in the process of replacement. Offices are being upgraded to 50Mbps connections, and dual-link connections are being introduced. The department aims to achieve a 99.999% availability service level with SITA, indicating a commitment to reducing downtime and improving service reliability.