The Australian Taxation Office says that no data has been lost during the agency’s extended outage as a result of the failure of a storage system.
The ATO revealed yesterday as the outage stretched into its second day that an HP Enterprise (HPE) SAN rolled out in November had failed and that automated failover to a backup system had failed.
The agency confirmed this morning that although there has been “some corruption of data,” the ATO is “in the process of fully restoring this information from back-up”. The ATO said that reports that 1 petabyte of data had been affected were incorrect.
“The petabyte of data referred to in media reports relates to storage capacity, which includes not only data but applications and systems as well,” the ATO said. “This figure does not relate to data impacted by the outages.”
The ATO is continuing to work with its IT partner, HPE, to restore its core systems. The ATO.gov.au website was restored yesterday afternoon.
“The links from the website to other impacted systems will be restored as these come back online,” a spokesperson said. “Our case management systems are back up and running.
“We are working towards bringing the Tax Agent Portal back online later today and will confirm when it is functional.Other services will be brought online gradually over the coming days and we will continue to keep the community informed of our progress.”
“We will work with any clients to ensure they are not disadvantaged because of the systems issues,” the spokesperson added.
According to the ATO, the problem with its storage system has not previously been encountered anywhere in the world.