Australian Taxation Office successfully replaces SAN, web site then fails anyway

The Australian Taxation Office says its planned Easter outage to replace its infamously wobbly HPE storage area network went well.

The Register prodded the ATO today because its website went down in the morning, as was the case after the SAN problems that took its site and services offline for several days in December 2016 and then again in February 2017.

This time around a spokesperson assured us “The issue was not related to the IT systems work carried out over the Easter long weekend to install our new storage area network which was successfully completed.” Today's outage was also not a system-wide affair: the spokesperson told us the Office's online services kept running even if its text-for-human-eyeballs bits were unavailable.

Also unavailable is the PwC report into why the Office's SANs failed twice, despite it being scheduled for delivery in late March.

But the spokesperson told The Register “We have received an interim report from PwC into the technology aspects of the outage and are considering the recommendations.” We're told the ATO is “... also finalising our own internal review into the business aspects of the outage, specifically the impact on our key stakeholders, including tax professionals, software developers and the superannuation industry.”

When we'll see those documents is anyone's guess: the ATO's spokesperson did not directly address our question about when the reports will be revealed to the taxpayers who paid for them to be created. ®