UPDATE August 10: The ABS website is back up! The Federal Government has ordered an investigation into the Denial Of Service (DOS) attacks which disrupted Census Night.
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August 9, 2016
by Anne Miller
Twenty-three million Australians, one website … what could possibly go wrong? Well everything, it seems.
Despite assurances from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that it was prepared for millions of people to try to log on to its website on Tuesday night, and despite assurances that “it’s fast, easy, secure and environmentally friendly” … it wasn’t.
I tried to log on to the ABS website at 9:30pm on Census night. Not unexpectedly, the website timed out.
A quick glance at other news websites confirmed my suspicions that I wasn’t alone:
ABC News:
The Federal Government says work is underway to fix a major outage affecting the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website this evening.
The ABC has been inundated with reports of the census website crashing or failing to load.
Brisbane Times:
As an estimated 16 million people logged on to the census website on Tuesday night, they were met with error messages and told the system was “overloaded” before the website crashed.
At 8pm on Tuesday evening, when accessing the census website brought up an error message or a blank page, hundreds of angry people contacted Fairfax Media to detail how they spent upwards of half an hour filling in the online form before their data was lost when the website went down.
Courier-Mail
The Census and Australian Bureau of Statistics websites have crashed on the most important day of the year, leaving Australians frustrated and unable to complete their form online.
Many trying to log on to the Census and ABS sites were met with an error message on Tuesday evening saying the site could not be reached.
Some took to Twitter to slam the ABS, with one user sarcastically saying they were “definitely technically competent enough to keep our most private data safe.”
On Twitter, the hashtag #censusfail was trending, while the ABS’s hopeful #mycensus was simply attracting sarcastic comments.
One South Burnett resident:
Security concerns for census? Not anymore, they can’t collect it #censusfail #auspol #mycensus
