RIYADH: Absher, the interactive e-service platform provided by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Interior, is updating its system, and online services will be unavailable for 10 hours, starting from midnight to 10 a.m. Friday, July 21.
Posting a message from its official Twitter handle, which has been retweeted by the MOI, Absher said its services will not be available for around 10 hours on Friday due to the updating procedure.
The platform notified users saying: “The scheduled updates for the systems of the e-platform will be carried out from 12:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. on Friday and … the platform cannot be used during the updating period.”
It urged users to avail themselves of the necessary services well before the time of updating or to wait until after it was finished.
One user, Samia Hanifi, told Arab News: “I needed to consult Absher for documents, as I could not do it, so I contacted (the) helpline number 9200 20405 seeking help. This is when I heard an operator say that the system will be inaccessible on Friday due to the update.”
The Absher smart services are available on Windows, Android, IOS, macOS, and Linux, and provide services to more than 26 million beneficiaries, both citizens and residents. The platform registered over 2.2 million electronic transactions in May 2023, the highest number of monthly transactions carried out since the start of the year.
The e-platform provides access to 280 services from the Ministry of Interior across three categories — individuals, business and government. It can be used to apply for jobs and Hajj permits, update passport information, make appointments, renew IDs and drivers’ licenses, register vehicles and pay traffic fines, among many other things.
Absher is credited with improving life in Saudi Arabia by making it much easier for citizens and residents to interact with government departments to obtain information and complete required procedures and paperwork from the comfort of their own homes.
From its launch in 2010 to December 2020 it had answered 1.2 billion queries from registered users, according to figures published by Arab News. It was also used to perform 300 million transactions over that 10 year period.
