Millions of Australians were expected to complete the census online last night, but when the website crashed thousands were left scratching their heads, with many taking to Twitter to express their frustration under the hashtag #CensusFail.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) initially blamed the outage on the high volume of traffic to the site, but this morning revealed as many as four alleged attacks by overseas hackers left them with no choice but to shut it down.
“It was an attack,” chief statistician David Kalisch told ABC NewsRadio early this morning.
“It was quite clear it was malicious,” he said, adding that throughout the day the website was targeted multiple times.
Just hours later, however, Census minister Michael McCormack has fuelled even more confusion by denying an “attack” or “hack” occurred.
Hear Mia Freedman talk all things Census fail on Mamamia Out Loud
“This was not an attack. Nor was it a hack but rather, it was an attempt to frustrate the collection of Bureau of Statistics Census data,” he said while fronting the press shortly before 11am.
“ABS Census security was not compromised. I repeat, not compromised and no data was lost.”
McCormack said the decision to shut down services was prompted in order to protect the online forms submitted before a hardware failure, which caused a router to become overloaded.
Top Comments
So, on Tuesday morning it was an attack. On Tuesday afternoon the Minister insisted there was no attack. On Thursday morning the Prime Minister is saying these Denial of Service ATTACKS were inevitable.
Malcolm has suddenly realised he's been on the wrong side of this argument and is now agreeing the ABS have monumentally screwed up.
Now he needs to accept the ABS cannot be trusted with their unprecedented decision to capture, store and link more-detailed information.
This Census should be abandoned. It's a joke and a great many people will treat it as such. The data will not be reliable.
Now that Malcolm has worked out which side he needs to be on, he needs to take control and order the ABS to can this thing for 2016.
Where's IBM in all this?
"Sorry for the delay. Your call is important to us and you have been placed in a queue. A customer service representative will be with you in approximately [computer generated voice] sometime before Christmas... maybe."
Or something like that, I assume.