The Australian Taxation Office’s online services have been downed by what a spokesperson for the agency has described as a “hardware issue”
“The ATO is currently experiencing a hardware issue which is impacting our online services, portals and website,” the spokesperson said.
“These issues are not being caused by any external factors. No taxpayer information has been compromised.
“We have specialist staff working to resolve these issues as a priority. We are working towards having systems back up and running tomorrow.”
The ATO has apologised for the impact of the outage.
The agency’s tech woes follow the high-profile outage suffered earlier this year by the Census. Technical missteps following a number of denial of service attacks saw the Census site pulled offline in August.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has estimated that the Census fiasco could cost it up to $30 million.
The government revealed last month that it had “reached a commercial-in-confidence settlement” with IBM, which was the lead contractor for the online portion of the Census.