System failures cost Home Affairs 13,867 hours of service in the last financial year

In the last financial year, the Department of Home Affairs suffered 13,867 hours of service failures, equivalent to 578 full days. This issue stemmed from failures in the national population register, which holds vital information such as births, deaths, marriages, and identity numbers. Home Affairs could not provide a precise measure of the total downtime experienced by the public, as they lack a validated method to quantify it.

The department's current monitoring tools track incidents separately across various networks, infrastructure, applications, biometric platforms, population register systems, and external service providers. However, they do not measure the overall availability of services across the entire transaction path, from the office or citizen-facing channel to all underlying systems and integrations.

The figures provided in response to an inquiry from EFF member Thapelo Mogale revealed that front-office hours lost decreased by 61%, from 35,426 in the previous year, while population register hours fell by 22%, from 14,720. North West province was the most affected, with 2,460 hours lost, followed by Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, each recording 2,296 and 2,291 hours lost, respectively. Limpopo had the highest population register downtime at 3,707 hours, surpassing KwaZulu-Natal and the North West province.

Three provinces, including KZN, North West, and the Northern Cape, saw an increase in lost hours compared to the previous year. The department is actively working on addressing these failures, including upgrading their service level with the State Information Technology Agency, migrating links to fiber and LTE, and replacing outdated Diginet lines and desktop systems.

A new monitoring system is being developed to accurately report service availability, incident duration, affected offices, and the underlying causes of downtime.