As millions of people simultaneously attempted to log in to complete their census forms last night, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) servers failed under the enormous traffic load. The ABS has blamed this on a hardware router failure, a false positive in a monitoring system, and external attackers who were allegedly attempting to overload the servers through a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack occurring at the same time. David Kalisch, head of the ABS, claimed that the servers were taken offline between 7:30 pm AEST, after which time the main social media accounts continued to advise people that there was no problem and to complete the Census forms until 10 pm.
“The public was advised prior to the Census that it would not be a target for attack. The claims made after the event call into question the competence of those who planned the Census, as well as the Minister responsible,” commented Simon Frew, Pirate Party President. “The ABS has already breached the public’s trust by admitting to retaining personal information and enabling the linking of external datasets. They have now made that worse by incompetently allowing the online data collection to fail.”