(9News Australia) The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ online Census website is back up and running following two days of error messages, leaving millions of Australians unable to complete it on the designated August 9 date.
The fix comes as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said there were “serious failures” in the preparations by the ABS.
The website was shut down on Tuesday at about 8.15pm after what the ABS claimed was a series of cyber-attacks.
Mr Turnbull told Sydney radio station 2GB this morning that the threat should have been addressed.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at a press conference yesterday. (AAP)
“This has clearly been a failure on the part of the ABS. Measures that ought to have been in place … were not,” he said.
Mr Turnbull warned “very serious consequences” would occur, and refused to comment on whether any sackings would take place.
“I too am very angry about this. I am bitterly disappointed,” he told 2GB host Alan Jones.
Mr Turnbull said he hoped the website would be back up and running today after a review by cyber security adviser, Alistair MacGibbon, however the ABS is yet to confirm this.
IBM, which won a $10 million contract to host and manage the website, should have been able to prepare for such obstacles, Mr Turnbull said.
“Measures that ought to have been put in place to prevent these denial of service attacks were not put in place,” he said.
“They [attacks] weren’t because of failures in the system that had been put in place for ABS by IBM.”
The ABS apologised for the bungled deployment and claimed hackers were responsible for the shutdown.
Australians upset by the outage took to social media and used the “#censusfail” hashtag to vent their anger.
Before census night, a number of high-profile politicians including Independent Senator Nick Xenophon questioned why the ABS required names to be recorded and the resulting data retained for four years.
“It seems the ABS has failed to make a compelling case why names must be provided and stored for four years, and unlike any other census in this nation’s history since that first census on the 2nd of April 1911, all names will be turned into a code that ultimately can be used to identify you,” Mr Xenophon said earlier this week.
Senator Xenophon also called for a Senate inquiry into the conundrum.
He was part of a clique of politicians, including Jacqui Lambie and Sarah Hanson-Young, who said they would risk $180-per-day penalties for refusing to identify themselves on their forms.
More than 20 million people are yet to complete the survey, and have until September 23 to do so.
