The Australian Tax Office faced a lengthy outage to its Web site and online services yesterday. An ATO spokesman said no taxpayer information had been compromised and claimed the problems were due to hardware issues and did not appear to have been caused by any external factors.The outage was first reported by the Tax Office on
Twitter just before 9.30am. “We’re investigating issues with our online
services, portals and our Web site as a priority,” the ATO said.
“Apologies for the inconvenience. Stay tuned for details.”
A later report was a little more detailed, saying: “The ATO is currently
experiencing a hardware issue which is impacting our online services, portals
and Web site. These issues are not being caused by any external factors. No
taxpayer information has been compromised.”
And a 5.30pm report suggested the services would remain offline throughout the
night. “We’ll update you again in the morning. Thanks for your
patience,” quoth the tax man.