The employment and labour department says the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) has to date paid in excess of R15bn to beneficiaries of the company relief scheme.

On April 16, the fund paid the first batch of Covid-19 Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (Ters) benefits to employers on behalf of workers.

Applications for May opened at midnight on Tuesday. UIF commissioner Teboho Maruping apologised for a break in its network, which has affected plans to capture the May Covid-19 Ters online applications.

"We would like to apologise to all our stakeholders, particularly our clients, for this unfortunate turn of events and the resultant delays.

"We are doing everything in our power to ensure that the problem is resolved today [yesterday], so that we can start processing May applications immediately," said Maruping.

"The fault of connectivity in Pretoria is due to a damaged fibre cable that links the UIF to the Sita [State Information Technology Agency] data centre."

The UIF promised to ensure that once the link had been restored, it would do all it could to catch up on lost time.

The UIF's ICT system development team is on standby to ensure that the system goes live as soon as the connectivity is re-established.

Maruping promised that the UIF will make a public announcement once the system has been restored.