ATO techs work through the night to combat outage
- 13 December, 2016 11:08
The Australian Taxation Office is working to restore critical systems, such as the Tax Agent Portal, by lunchtime today, according to acting ATO CIO Steve Hamilton.
The agency says it is confident that ATO.gov.au will be available later today.
The ATO has suffered a widespread outage of its online services. The outage, which began yesterday, has been attributed to a “hardware issue”.
“Specialist technicians have been working through the night to rectify the outages we’ve been experiencing with our systems over the last 24 hours,” Hamilton said.
The acting CIO says the problems “have not been caused by any external factors and no taxpayer information has been compromised.”
“We apologise for any inconvenience our clients may have experienced,” Hamilton said. “We will provide further updates later this morning when more information comes to hand.”
The large-scale outage follows the high-profile problems suffered by this year’s Census.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has estimated that the Census problems could cost it up to $30 million.
The government says it has “reached a commercial-in-confidence settlement” with IBM, which was the lead contractor for the online portion of the Census.