24/10/2025
No one home? Home Affairs’ asylum seeker management system offline for almost a week
News24 – 17 October 2025
The Home Affairs system for refugees and asylum seekers has been offline since last Friday, halting all processing.
• The Home Affairs system for refugees and asylum seekers has been offline since last Friday, halting all processing.
• Organisations like Refugee Social Services and The Scalabrini Centre confirmed the system’s downtime.
• Home Affairs has yet to explain the outage that has seemingly left refugee centres unable to operate.
The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) Asylum Seeker Management System (ASM System) – used to process asylum seekers and renew refugees’ documents – has been offline for almost a week.
According to James Chapman from the Scalabrini Centre, a non-profit organisation, reports of the outage had been coming from refugee reception centres across the country since last Friday.
“Yesterday and today [Thursday], we also received reports that the system is still offline. We were not given a reason why the system is offline,” Chapman said.
He added that asylum seekers and refugees could not be processed at refugee reception offices because the system was offline.
An employee from Refugee Social Services in Durban, who did not want to be named, also told News24 that the system was down.
“It is true. The people we help here said they were having technical issues. We are not sure for how many days, but there was an issue that people were not being processed because there was a problem at the DHA,” the staff member said.
Linton Harmse, head of Refugee Rights at Nelson Mandela University, said the system outage can severely affect refugees and asylum seekers whose permits have expired.
“I know it’s been off since Friday, and by yesterday [Thursday], it was still offline. None of the applications that have been submitted have been processed because they cannot be renewed since the system is off,” Harmse said.
He warned that the disruption prevents the online renewal of permits, which has serious consequences.
“You sit with an expired permit and have not received your new one. That can have lots of implications for children at school, for people who are employed, and for those whose bank accounts get frozen because they cannot provide a valid permit,” he said.
“If your permit expires, your bank account immediately shuts down and stays that way until you come with a new permit.”
Harmse explained that while deportation cannot occur simply because a permit has expired due to system failures, the effects are still damaging.
He said:
Deportation is a long process. There cannot be a deportation because your permit has expired due to the system being offline. That would be a miscarriage of justice.
He added that outages like this reflect long-standing issues at Home Affairs.
“These are systemic challenges at Home Affairs, where, from time to time, the system is off. The people at local offices are just as frustrated as the clients because they want to process renewals. It’s a matter that must be dealt with at the national level,” Harmse said.
Thomas Khathiyani from the Northwest House of Refugees said the system going offline is not unusual, but it has never lasted this long.
“We are used to the system being offline for two hours and then coming back online again. It’s not like it goes offline the whole day. When it is offline, it can take one day or a few hours to be online again. But last week when I was there, they were working,” Khathiyani said.
Technical outage
While the Department of Home Affairs has not yet responded to News24’s query about the outage and its cause, stakeholders did receive communication about the issue on Friday morning.
“Dear Stakeholders, This notice serves to inform all internal and external stakeholders of a technical outage currently affecting the Asylum Seeker Management System (ASM System),” an email read.
“The system has been non-operational since Monday and, as of this morning, remains unavailable, resulting in the inability of Refugee Reception Offices (RROs) to process applications or provide related services.”
The department said it is working with the relevant technical teams to restore system functionality as a matter of priority, but until the issue is resolved, significant delays in service delivery should be expected at all Refugee Reception Offices.
“The department sincerely apologises for the inconvenience caused and appreciates the understanding and cooperation of all partners and stakeholders as we work to resolve this issue urgently.”
