Parts of ATO website up and running as agency tries to recover lost data

THE Australian Taxation Office is trying to recover the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text following a major systems outage.

THE Australian Taxation Office’s online system is still experiencing difficulties after a glitch caused the agency’s servers to crash.

But even more concerning is fears that the ATO might be unable to recover some of its data.

Nearly 48 hours after the outage the ATO has restored its website but certain tools and portals still remain unavailable to the public.

The crash came about due to a failure in a hardware storage solution provided by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the glitch is believed to be the first of its kind in the world, according to the head of the government agency.

ATO chief information officer Steve Hamilton said the office was working with provider HPE to resolve the issues with its network systems.

On Tuesday, Mr Hamilton said that no taxpayer information had been compromised, pre-empting any concerns about a data breach or outside interference.

Unlike the trouble-plagued online Census, the ATO system was not brought down by any external factors such as a denial of service attack.

“These outages relate to a new hardware storage solution that was upgraded in November 2015,” he said, adding that 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 HPE to determine the underlying cause.”

However there remains concerns that the tax office may have lost a considerable amount of data in the crash.

On Tuesday, business and technology website ITnews reported that the government agency was at the time still trying to recover the loss of 1 petabyte of data in the wake of the outage.

A petabyte is roughly a million gigabytes, or as the AAP put it, the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text.

In a statement supplied to news.com.au on Wednesday morning, Mr Hamilton said no public data has been lost.

“We can confirm that there has been no loss of data. While we experienced some corruption of data, we are in the process of fully restoring this information from back-up,” he said.

“We are working towards bringing the Tax Agent Portal back online later today and will confirm when it is functional.”

‘If you’re still seeing a website maintenance page when you visit the site, we recommend clearing your browser cookies and cache,’ the ATO says.

At 6:42pm on Tuesday evening, the ATO tweeted that the website was back up and running for general tax and superannuation information.

“You may find you’re unable to access certain tools, calculators and our online services (such as the portals) while we continue working to restore all of our services,” the ATO said.

“If you’re still seeing a website maintenance page when you visit the site, we recommend clearing your browser cookies and cache.”

But the outage of one of the government’s most important online services comes just four months after the bungled online Census which was allowed to happen in part due to poor planning and the failure of hardware provided by contractor IBM.

As such, the ATO has promised a thorough investigation into the matter.

“The ATO will undertake a full investigation of its IT systems to ascertain how this event occurred,” Revenue Minister Kelly O’Dwyer said.

Labor frontbencher Andrew Leigh took the opportunity to lay the boot in and said the government needed to explain why it was unable to provide basic online services.

“The tax office site outage is inconveniencing taxpayers and tax agents alike,” he said in a statement.

— With AAP