Johannesburg - The South Africa Post Office on Friday alerted South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) beneficiaries of a "technical difficulty" it had experienced since the early hours of the morning with the social grants payment system.
The SA Post Office in a statement said the glitch caused the timing out of a number of Sassa social grants withdrawals at ATM’s and some retail merchants.
"In a number of these incidents, unfortunately, customers’ accounts would be automatically debited with the amount of money they intended to withdraw without having been dispensed with the cash by the ATM," SA post office spokesperson, Johan Kruger said.
Postbank was currently affecting the auto-reversals of the funds affecting all the accounts erroneously debited in this manner.
He said that the funds would all be available Saturday and all the affected social grants beneficiaries are urged not to despair but resume their transactions a day later.
"We apologise to all the affected social grants beneficiaries for the inconvenience. Our IT technicians have been on-site working on resolving this matter," acting managing director at Postbank, Hannes van der Merwe said.
"While the Sassa social grants payments system has now stabilised, we remain alert because the volume of transaction requests is now high and this may impact the system’s performance for the remainder of the day."
The SA Post Office said that a parallel process to investigate the cause of this system difficulty was underway to prevent similar incidents in the future.