ATO digital services and systems downtime

Since approximately 9.30am AEDT Monday, 12th December 2016, the entire Australian Taxation Office (ATO) website including the tax agent portal has shutdown due to a “world first” hardware issue. Many internal processing systems for ATO staff were also affected by these hardware issues leading to many ATO internal systems being taken offline.

The media statement released today from the acting Chief Information Officer Steve Hamilton explains that; ‘these outages relate to a new hardware storage solution that was upgraded in November 2015. Our primary back-up systems, that should have kicked in immediately, were also affected. We understand this is the first time this problem has been encountered anywhere in the world and we are working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to determine the underlying cause. While these investigations are ongoing, we have had to implement alternative recovery procedures that are taking longer to complete.’