ATO restores most services

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) says that most of its core services are back online after an outage last week.

The ATO said that its Tax Agent, Business and BAS Agent Portals, website, and Standard Business Reporting (SBR) services are back online, with ATO staff and its tech partner, HP Enterprise, working through the weekend.

“We are in final stages of restoration of the Australian Business Register (ABR) and expect it to be available shortly,” the agency said in a message early this morning. “We expect the remainder of our services to become available throughout the day.”

The ATO warned that there may be some slowness due to ongoing work on its systems.

“Our focus will now turn to building system resilience to best ensure the stability of our services to the community,” the ATO said.

The ATO has confirmed that last week’s tech woes were connected to an outage in December, when a storage system failure wreaked havoc on the agency’s core systems. That outage was caused by the failure of an HPE storage system, with both the primary and backup systems affected.

The ATO has commissioned an independent PwC-led review of December’s events.