The Australian Taxation Office has had to take offline a number of its key services due to “intermittent system issues”.
The ATO pulled its myTax service, business portals and other online services offline.
“We have been experiencing intermittent issues that are affecting portal functions and other online systems including the practitioner lodgment service (PLS),” said a message from Assistant Commissioner Colin Walker sent to tax practitioners this afternoon.
“These services will be unavailable or experience slow performance from 3.00pm EST.”
In June the ATO was hit by a major outage.
That outage followed on the heels of a report issued by the agency that detailed some of the underlying causes of major outages the agency experienced in December and February.
The report revealed 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,
Commissioner of Taxation Chris Jordan today told the National Press Club that he couldn’t give “an iron-clad guarantee that all systems will work 100 per cent of the time”.
Tax Time had “begun well,” he said in his remarks prepared for the NPC address.
The ATO expected things to go smoothly but was “ready to respond quickly if there are any hiccups or unexpected outages,” the commissioner said.
“We also have underway an independent analysis of our entire IT infrastructure, platforms and services to identify and reduce the risks of future unplanned outages,” Jordan said.
“We are well aware that if we are to offer and encourage the use of digital services, then we have to have our systems available when people need them.”
To resolve some intermittent system issues, we’ve had to take our portals, myTax, and other online services offline this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/jvCUmKL7dh
— ato.gov.au (@ato_gov_au) July 5, 2017