ATO suffers brief website outage

Update 10.05am AEST: Services have been restored.

The Australian Taxation Office suffered a brief outage of its website this morning. The Tax Agent, Business and BAS Agent Portals, ATO Online services, Standard Business Reporting (SBR), Australian Business Register (ABR) and Supertick were not affected and were all available during this period, the agency said.

The outage followed the weekend migration of the ATO to a new storage area network (SAN). The ATO said this morning's outage was not related to the SAN migration.

The ATO yesterday told Computerworld that the SAN migration had been successfully completed.

“Moving to the new SAN platform is a complex process, and while the component of the migration that required scheduled system outages has been completed, IT work will continue to be carried out throughout April and May,” an ATO spokesperson said yesterday.

“We are confident the new hardware will offer a better system for the future and enable us to provide the high quality experience and service the Australian community expects of us.”

The SAN replacement came in the wake of major ATO outages in February and December linked to the agency’s storage systems.