No need to panic, says Sassa after SRD grant system crashes due to massive traffic

The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) said those still experiencing technical difficulties with WhatsApp or the website in their applications for the Covid-19 social relief of distress (SRD) grants still have the whole month of August to apply in order to receive their August payments. 

Sassa was forced to expand its application channels for the Covid-19 SRD grant after excessive traffic on its website resulted to a slow start on Friday.

Sassa payments down

Sassa CEO Busisiwe Memela-Khambula said that their application channels (WhatsApp and the website) experienced massive traffic 45 minutes after the opening of the applications.

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“This is a clear indication of the huge need for food aid among others, from distressed inhabitants of the country, and therefore the President couldn’t have reinstated this grant at a better time. This morning, we added two new online channels for application in order to ease the pressure on our website, namely https://govchat.app/login and Facebook messenger, https://www.facebook.com/govchat.org,” said  Memela-Khambula.

“Applications opened at 09:00 but in 45 minutes time the utilisation of the server hosting the website was above 95%.”

‘Technicians on high alert’

Memela-Khambule said that this resulted in the website slowing down dramatically, which necessitated the agency to use its disaster recovery sites and add more channels for application immediately. 

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“Our technicians are on high alert and will monitor the impact of these interventions in order to continuously improve the application experience for our clients”: Memela-Khambula added. 

“Early next week, another channel called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) will be added to the existing ones. The construction of this channel is at an advanced stage and it will help people without smartphones to also be able to apply effortlessly. Further announcements will be made in due course,” she said.