Key Australian Taxation Office services have gone down.
“We are currently experiencing systems issues that are affecting all our systems including ato online, portals, PLS and our website,” ATO assistant commissioner Colin Walker said in a statement.
“We are working on this as a priority. We will keep you updated on the progress.”
“We are aware some internal and external systems are intermittently unavailable, including ato.gov.au. This may affect the ability for some users to access a number of ATO systems,” a systems update from the agency said.
Update: The ATO has advised that as of 2.15pm, services began coming back online.
The outage comes on the heels of a report issued by the ATO that detailed some of the underlying causes of major outages the agency experienced in December and February.
That report, released earlier this month, revealed that there were months of warning signs in the lead-up to the December outage, which has been blamed on a SAN operated by HP Enterprise on behalf of the ATO,
The report made 14 recommendations, including boosting the ATO’s “IT capability pertaining to infrastructure design and implementation planning (particularly relating to resilience and availability)”.
“We are committed to addressing each of these areas and have already made improvements or have work underway,” said a statement issued by the ATO in the wake of the report.
The ATO migrated to a new SAN in April.
The agency's IT chief, CIO Ramez Katf, was recently given expanded responsibilities, with the government appointing him to the role of Second Commissioner of Taxation.