Australian Tax Office website crashes as people attempt to file tax returns

The Australian Tax Office’s website has crashed as people attempt to file their tax returns.

The Australian Taxation Office website has crashed as people attempt to file their tax returns.

The Australian Tax Office’s website has temporarily crashed as people attempt to file their tax returns.

A Department of Human Services spokeswoman told The Australian: “Some services, including myGov, are currently unavailable or experiencing slowness. The department is working on the issue and apologises for the inconvenience.”

Some of our services (incl. the portals & our online services via myGov) are currently unavailable or experiencing slowness. We're working on the issue & apologise for the inconvenience. Stay tuned for updates. pic.twitter.com/oTQNDfC6WP

— ato.gov.au (@ato_gov_au) July 12, 2019

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said on Twitter yesterday the agency had already received over one million tax returns for the last financial year, which he said was thanks to the government’s new suite of tax cuts.

“The @ato_gov_au has received over 1 million tax returns for the 18/19 year!,” he wrote.

“As of this morning over 1.1 million tax returns have been lodged compared to around 600,000 at the same time last year. Despite Labor’s opposition, Australians have now got the tax cuts they voted for!”

The @ato_gov_au has received over 1 million tax returns for the 18/19 year!
As of this morning over 1.1 million tax returns have been lodged compared to around 600,000 at the same time last year. Despite Labor’s opposition, Australians have now got the tax cuts they voted for!

— Josh Frydenberg (@JoshFrydenberg) July 11, 2019

It comes as News Corp reported this week Australians are urged to “wait a few weeks” before lodging their returns to give tax office staff a break amid unprecedented demand.

“They are being overwhelmed with calls,” Australian Services Union tax branch secretary Jeff Lapidos said. “They planned for an extra 28 per cent in call volumes but they underestimated substantially.”

According to Mr Lapidos the ATO has added casual shifts and pulled staff of other duties to try and maintain services.

“Despite that some 50,000 calls have been blocked from getting through,” he said.

“People are calling back time and time again to get through and that’s making it worse. When they do get through to staff, people are complaining. The union is asking the public to please be patient and if possible hold off.”

The system failure has been mocked by social media users trying to file their tax returns.

“Gee - who would have predicted you might need to service a substantial increase in users at this time.... that would be just about anyone. do you guys have any managers there?” one twitter user wrote.

Jonathan Rende, Senior Vice President Product of incident response platform PagerDuty, said to minimise the chances of future incidents, businesses and government bodies like the ATO need to have visibility into their entire tech stack and have a team ready to respond quickly when outages inevitably occur.

“Digital service reliability is critical in this ‘always on’ world,” he said. “Even minor service degradations and short outages can cost millions... A matter of minutes can have very tangible effects on a business’ bottom line.

“Companies and organisations need to be able to identify issues quickly, coordinate a rapid response and resolution and learn from the incident or disruption.”