Think you’ve got a tough day at work ahead?
Spare a thought for the tech team at the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Those of you who got online last night to complete the Census form must have been pretty frustrated to spend your precious time doing your civic duty, only to be greeted with error messages when attempting to hit send.
Social media lit up. Those calling the ABS helpline received a recorded message. Complaints were made to newspapers. And the ABS has a massive job on its hands now trying to communicate what went wrong.
At 8:38pm the ABS tweeted that the website was experiencing an “outage”, a good 40 minutes after the servers crashed. Finally at 10:59pm, it admitted the site would not be restored until at least this morning.
Could the problem have been overload (which you’d think should have been expected) as millions of people logged on to the Census website?
Could the problem have also been that too many of us didn’t actually know we had until September 23 to fill out the forms? Thus we didn’t actually need to dutifully all log on at once. Perhaps the deadline is something that could have been better communicated?
But this morning the ABS claims the Census site failed due to hackers, with chief statistician David Kalisch telling ABC radio “it was an attack”. He said it was malicious and it was attacked four times, with the fourth around 7:30pm when the ABS decided to shut down the site.
After the fourth attack, just after 7:30pm, the ABS took the precaution of closing down the system to ensure the integrity of the data.
— Census Australia (@ABSCensus) August 9, 2016
Now that makes us feel real comfortable about private details being shared via the site.
This morning the website has the following message:
The service won’t be restored tonight. We will update you in the morning. We apologise for the inconvenience. There will be no fines for completing the Census after August 9. There’s still plenty of time to complete the Census. Thanks for your patience.
Attack and/or overload — that’s one serious fail.
Fines will not be imposed for completing the Census after Census night.
— Census Australia (@ABSCensus) August 9, 2016
ABS would remind Australians that they have plenty of time to complete the Census, to well into September.
— Census Australia (@ABSCensus) August 9, 2016