• South Africans this morning woke up to check the election results to no avail.
• The IEC’s online dashboard was offline due to a system glitch.
• Results were back online after a few hours of downtime.

This morning as South Africans went to check the ongoing election results tally from the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), many found that the results had stopped being counted on the official dashboard, with the percentage of votes tallied returned to zero.

Just before the dashboard stopped counting the votes, the percentage was around 55 of total voting districts completed. Instead, the dashboard had seemingly been wiped clean, much to the anxiousness of South Africans, fearing some form of political meddling that has become synonymous with many elections across the continent.

The results returned to the dashboard just before 10:00 this morning, and thankfully the IEC says that the results have not been compromised. It seems the problem was caused by a technical glitch, and all appears to have returned without any discrepancies.

“The Electoral Commission confirms that it has experienced an interruption in the replication of data from its national data centre and various Results Operation Centres (RoCs),” a statement from the commission posted to X reads.

“The data in the centre remains intact and the results have not been compromised. All services have been restored and the leaderboard is working as normal. Result processing continues unaffected,” it added.

It seems the issue only affected the public-facing dashboard, and the IEC’s internal systems were not affected. “The results system is still operational and local offices continue to capture results,” an IEC spokesperson told Reuters this morning following the outage.

Technicians were working to restore the results at the results centre in Midrand, Johannesburg.

According to the live results, the ANC is still leading with just over 41 percent of the vote, followed by the DA at 24 percent. They are followed by the MK at just over 11 percent of voter support. The MK ousted the EFF as the third-most supported party in South Africa at around 20:00 on Thursday.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) also updated its prediction at around 51.5 percent of voting districts declared in the early hours of Friday morning. This means that the prediction becomes more accurate than the initial one, and shows that the ANC’s support may fall to just 40.5 percent and the MK’s support may climb to around 15 percent.