ATO hit with fresh online services outage


By Dylan Bushell-Embling
Thursday, 06 July, 2017

ATO hit with fresh online services outage

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has recovered from a fresh outage to its online services, but insisted that the issue was unrelated to the SAN system failure that triggered last year's major outages.

A disruption yesterday afternoon required the agency to briefly take its online services offline while it rebooted the mainframe.

The mainframe had been impacted by intermittent system issues caused by certain applications running incorrectly, the ATO said.

The decision to reboot the mainframe was to ensure the ATO's web services were fully operational in time for the 8.00 pm to 9.00 pm peak usage window.

According to the agency the issues impacted ATO Online services, the Tax Agent, Business and BAS Agent Portals, Standard Business Reporting, the Australian Business Register and the ATO's case management systems. But the website itself remained online.

The disruption comes in the wake of a series of outages of the ATO's online systems in December last year and February this year. A recent report into the outages traced the issue to a failure of the HPE-provided storage area network (SAN) due to hardware and software errors and the misconfiguration of error reporting and backup systems.

In the wake of the failures, HPE rebuilt its storage system with a new SAN and plans to decommission the old system for forensic analysis once the data transfer process is complete.

Image credit: ©alphaspirit/Dollar Photo Club

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

Related News

PagerDuty appoints Ingram Micro as Australian reseller

AI-first operations management company PagerDuty has signed on Ingram Micro as its first...

Sharon AI to deploy 600 PB of VAST Data infrastructure

Australian neocloud Sharon AI has agreed to deploy a quantum of VAST Data OS equivalent...

Megaport arranges to use VAST Data's AI OS

Megaport has selected VAST Data to support the company's expansion into compute, GPU and AI...


  • All content Copyright © 2026 Westwick-Farrow Pty Ltd