“Freak” fibre break delays UIF claims

The Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) has apologised for a delay to the capturing of COVID-19 TERS applications for May, citing a “freak break in its network.”

“We would like to apologise to all our stakeholders and particularly our clients for this unfortunate turn of events and the resultant delays,” said UIF Commissioner Teboho Maruping.

“We are doing everything in our power to ensure that the problem is resolved today so that we can start processing May applications immediately.”

Maruping said the fault is due to a damaged fibre cable in Pretoria that links the UIF to the State Information Technology Agency’s datacentre.

The system, which the UIF said has been undergoing a test run since last week, was meant to go live yesterday, but the break has stopped this from happening.

The UIF said that once the link has been restored, it will do everything it can to catch up on the time lost as a result of the outage.

To this end, it added, the UIF’s ICT system development team is on standby to ensure that the system goes live as soon as the connectivity is re-established.

“We have received an avalanche of complaints because of this and we understand how this could be frustrating to our clients and stakeholders,” Maruping said.

“I would like to assure each and every one of those who have been negatively affected that this was beyond our hands but will try to make up [for it].”

Maruping said that in the last two months, and as a result of the UIF’s lockdown relief benefits, it has recorded peak traffic.

“In general we have managed to keep our heads above water under those circumstances,” he said.

Maruping confirmed that the UIF will make a public announcement as soon as the system has been restored.