The ATO has been experiencing outages over the past few months. The entire website and associated client portals were unavailable for a number of days. The outages returned the first week of February 2017 with the entire website down for four days. The ATO has confirmed that last week’s outage was connected to the previous outage in December last year. The outage was caused by a storage system failure that created havoc with the agency’s core systems. The reason for the failure was the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise storage system, with both the primary and backup systems affected.
The full range of services should be active by the middle of February at the latest. The situation is all the more precarious as the ATO admits they do not understand why the system failed.
According to the Financial Review, the ATO chief information officer Ramez Katf said they would get rid of the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise data storage system that first failed last December. They are also expanding the scope of an ongoing review into the first crash to include the latest one.
Mr Katf stated that because the 13-month-old HPE storage system was still new, it had added to the confusion surrounding its technical failure. But, the ATO would keep faith in the system and upgrade to the latest storage area network instead.
“We commissioned it in late 2015, a little over 12 months ago, which I think adds to the mystery. This type of hardware is typically very resilient, and we were taken aback by the extensiveness of the outage and its impact,” Mr Katf said.
For those of you affected by the ATO outages, the system may continue to run slowly for a few weeks. Currently, the data is being migrated onto the new hardware which means there are further outages expected in the coming weeks. The ATO says it will plan service outages for non-peak times to minimise the disruption to businesses and accountants.
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