Finance Ministry Website Inaccessible for Several Days

(JUBA) – The official website of South Sudan’s Ministry of Finance and Planning, https://mofp.gov.ss, has been offline for a full week, displaying a suspension notice that has left the public without access to important fiscal documents and updates.

Since Monday, 4 August 2025, users visiting the site have encountered a message stating:

“This Account has been suspended. Contact your hosting provider for more information.”

As of Friday morning, the website remains unavailable, and no official statement has been issued by the ministry to explain the disruption or when services are expected to resume.

The Ministry of Finance and Planning is a key institution in managing South Sudan’s public finances, national budgets and resource allocation. Its website serves as a central platform for publishing budget documents, expenditure reports, press releases and official communications.

This week’s prolonged outage has affected the timely dissemination of information, particularly as the ministry is set to present the 2025–2026 national budget to the Transitional National Legislative Assembly. Members of the public, civil society, researchers, and donors were expecting to access the proposed budget online, but the website’s unavailability has made that impossible.

The reason for the suspension has not been made public. However, IT specialists familiar with government systems suggest the most likely causes include an expired hosting agreement or non payment of service fees. Such administrative lapses are not uncommon in institutions with limited digital capacity and technical oversight.

Though the suspension appears to be a technical issue rather than a security breach, the consequences extend beyond inconvenience. In a country working to build institutional transparency and restore public trust, the absence of a key government communication channel for an extended period undermines efforts toward openness and accountability.

Several analysts note that digital access to public finance information is particularly important in fragile economic contexts such as South Sudan’s. With rising inflation, limited foreign currency and ongoing reliance on international support, open access to budget and expenditure data is a cornerstone of credible governance.

Recommendations by digital governance experts include:

+Timely renewal of government domains and hosting services

+Establishing a dedicated IT and web maintenance unit within each ministry

+Publishing mirrored content on backup platforms

+Issuing immediate public updates when service interruptions occur

As of the time of writing, https://mofp.gov.ss remains suspended. It is still unclear when the website will be restored or whether an internal review of the outage is underway.

With increasing reliance on online platforms for public service delivery and governance, even brief outages, let alone week-long suspensions can significantly disrupt communication, planning and oversight.