Tax office site crashing leaves many worrying about their personal details

The Australian Tax Office has been left a little red-faced after a major outage took many of their services offline for the last two days. It has been marked as the first problem of its kind “encountered anywhere in the world”. However, they want you to know that your information is secure.

Staff emails reveal that it was a problem within “an infrastructure issue inside [their] data centre”. With some managers pointing to some hardware installed in late 2015. Acting ATO chief information officer Steve Hamilton told the ABC, “Our primary back-up systems, that should have kicked in immediately, were also affected”. He added, “We understand this is the first time this problem has been encountered anywhere in the world and we are working with [external service provider Hewlett Packard Enterprise] to determine the underlying cause.

“While these investigations are ongoing, we have had to implement alternative recovery procedures that are taking longer to complete”.

After the Census website problem earlier this year, Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh is questioning the Turnbull Government. Mr Leigh told the ABC, “I think Australians are beginning to ask this question, why can’t the Turnbull Government keep government websites online”.

Pointing out the Census website problem, Mr Leigh added, “Now tax agents and individual tax filers are finding that they can’t get onto the ATO website, it’s just not good enough.”

As of right now, the ATO website is back up, but it is unknown as to what internal systems may still be affected.