ATO blames hardware for web outage


By Dylan Bushell-Embling
Monday, 12 December, 2016

ATO blames hardware for web outage

The ATO has identified a hardware failure as the cause of a recent outage of the department's entire web presence, including online services, portals and web pages.

The website went offline on Monday at around 9.30 am EDT and was still inaccessible as of this morning.

At around 3.30 pm, the ATO tweeted that it had identified the hardware issue causing the system outages, and was working to repair it.

The ATO hired Accenture in 2004 to modernise the agency's IT systems. The contract had a fixed price of $445 million, but a report from the Audit Office found that by 2010 the cost had blown out to $756.7 million.

Last year, the Tax and Revenue Committee also found that upgrades to the ATO's Online Tax Portal caused access problems for some tax practitioners in FY14.

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