Ahead of the release of the State Capture Report this evening, the official website of the South African Public Protector has crashed.
UPDATE: As of November 2nd at 16:45, the Public Protector’s State Capture Report has been published on Scribd and can be read here.
The official website of the Office of the Public Protector remains offline.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE AS FOLLOWS:
As South Africa’s new Public Protector Adv Busisiwe Mkhwebane has been ordered to release the State Capture Report before 17:00PM this evening, South Africans are waiting with bated breath.
However, while the Office of the Public Protector moves to release the report, the official web presence of the external state institution has crashed.
While it is likely that numerous South Africans’ attempts to access the page have resulted in servers being unable to field such a multitude of requests, there has been no confirmation if the Office is presently facing a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.
Read: ANC vs DA vs EFF: What do each promise for internet access in South Africa?
A DDoS attack is a form of electronic offensive wherein a number of computers send numerous requests to a web server to either elongate wait times or render it inaccessible for a period of time.
Earlier this year, the official web presences of the SABC, ANC, and EFF faced DDoS attacks, which Anonymous Africa claimed responsibility for.
While the official web presence of the Office of the Public Protector has been listed in some cases as pprotect.org, the Office has clarified on Twitter that that the actual address of the site is publicprotector.org.
Public Protector website is https://t.co/gjUYpZWj3S not https://t.co/SiPRUdDQF1 We will make an announcement once the report is live.
“” Public Protector SA (@PublicProtector) November 2, 2016
South Africans have taken to Twitter to express their frustration and worry, with some citing their fear that the report could be tampered with or otherwise altered ahead of its release.
What assurances do we have that it hasn’t/wont be tempered with before its release?@ermbates
“” Risenga Mashinini (@RisMashinini) November 2, 2016
We’ll continue to update this article as the story develops.
What are your thoughts? Share them with us in the comments below!
Follow Bryan Smith on Twitter: @bryansmithSA
