• The Department of Employment and Labour says that a number of its UIF online service platforms are now offline.
• This includes UIF uFiling, USSD, UIF Virtual Office and the UIF Covid 19 TERS system.
• The department says that outages relate to a court order handed down that affects is digital service providers, but it itself doesn’t exactly know the full extent of the issue.

The Department of Employment and Labour says that there may be longer queues than usual at its in-person service points across the country because a number of its online platforms are now unavailable.

According to the department via a statement issued on Tuesday, the following services have been disrupted due to a service termination:

• uFiling,
• Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD),
• UIF Virtual Office,
• and UIF Covid 19 TERS systems.

This outage stemmed from a judgement handed down by the Pretoria High Court on a matter of the service provider running the UIF online portals.

“The court issued an interim interdict preventing with immediate effect, the new service provider from rendering services for the UIF online portal. As a result, the UIF online platforms are currently disrupted,” the statement reads.

It is not immediately evident what occurred in the UIF or between the service provider that led to the court order being handed down, but seeing as hundreds of thousands of South Africans are dependent on UIF services, this disruption will likely have far-reaching consequences.

For example, in 2020 it was reported that over 200 000 people make use of the COVID-19 TERS fund.

“We are anticipating that the disruption will result in increased volumes of clients at our service points. We therefore wish to sincerely apologise to our clients and stakeholders for the delays and any inconvenience emanating from the disruption of UIF online platforms,” the department said, adding that it will seek to increase the operating hours at its in-person service centres to handle the increased amount of queries.

It seems that the department itself doesn’t even know what happened, with the statement reading:

“Minister (Nomakhosazana) Meth, working with the administration and entities of the department intends to get to the bottom of the reasons that led to such disruptions in order to ensure that in future, such incidents are avoided and the negative implications averted.”

“The Minister is seized with the matter and an appropriate action will be taken when necessary,” it adds, whatever that means. There has not been a timeline set for when the services are likely to return to being online.

When you head to any of the affected platforms, they simply say that the systems are offline “due to planned maintenance” which is not actually what is happening, but likely this is the cut-and-paste service interruption screen.

[Image – Photo by Levi Jones on Unsplash]