The SABC couldn't cope with Black Friday last week with the public broadcaster's TV licence validation server that crashed, causing losses of TV set sales to retailers across the country and leading potential TV set buyers fuming and abandoning transactions.
Consumers who wanted to make use of special deals on the heavily discounted retail day known as Black Friday was left frustrated by the SABC and decided to abandoned sales and leave, causing losses to shops as the SABC's validation server buckled and was unable to process TV licence validations and issuing of new licences.
Consumers who want to buy a TV set and a new SABC TV licence or who want to add another TV set to an existing licence, must validate their TV licence number in shops. The SABC's TV licence server was however not capable with coping on Black Friday and timed out due to capacity problems, leaving consumers and retailers stranded.
The SABC said "the TV licence validation server was overwhelmed by the abnormal increase in validation requests from retailers due to the Black Friday deals which resulted in the server timing out between 07:00 and 10:30".
"We have upgraded the server capability to cater for the influx of validations and retailers were able to process online validations from 10:45".
The SABC said it's "apologising for any inconvenience experienced."
