The City of Tshwane faces an internet outage, disrupting all IT services, including the prepaid electricity vending system. The outage, possibly linked to a global cybersecurity issue, has left many residents unable to top up their electricity units. Residents of Tshwane are facing a significant inconvenience as the city’s internet connection has gone down, halting all IT-related services. This outage, announced by the City of Tshwane via a post on X (formerly Twitter), has particularly impacted the prepaid vending system, leaving many customers unable to top up their electricity units.
The announcement stated, “The City of Tshwane’s Internet connection is down. Residents should please note that all IT-related services, including the prepaid vending system, are not accessible at this time. Technicians are attending to the problem.”
While the exact cause of the outage has not been disclosed, there is speculation that it may be linked to a global issue caused by cybersecurity platform provider Crowdstrike. On Friday morning, Crowdstrike confirmed that a “content deployment” issue had caused Windows computers worldwide to enter a Blue Screen of Death boot loop. This incident has affected major services and companies globally, including airlines, airports, emergency services, and the London Stock Exchange.
In South Africa, Capitec Bank also experienced significant disruptions, with its services offline for several hours. By 10:00 on Friday, Capitec announced that it had restored full functionality, attributing the problem to a patch deployed by Crowdstrike. “Since early this morning, clients have faced difficulties accessing various banking services, including online banking, mobile app transactions, and card payments,” Capitec stated. “Our tech team has worked quickly to resolve the problem — we are pleased to report that all our banking has now been fully restored.”
This incident follows a recent Microsoft cloud services outage that impacted US flight operations on Thursday, 18 July 2024. Microsoft resolved the issue around 07:00 SA time, but some users continued to experience problems accessing Microsoft 365 cloud services. According to Microsoft’s cloud status page, a configuration change in a portion of their Azure backend workloads caused connectivity failures, affecting downstream Microsoft 365 services.
As technicians work to resolve the internet outage in Tshwane, residents are urged to remain patient. The widespread nature of these IT issues highlights the critical importance of robust cybersecurity measures and the potential for cascading effects when problems arise in global IT infrastructure.
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