ATO battles another online outage

The Australian Taxation Office is struggling to recover from the latest in a series of outages to its systems, after its online platforms went down on Thursday morning.

In a mirror of the consistent downtime that has struck the ATO's online portals over the past six months, the agency's website, portals, and practitioner lodgment service became unavailable at around 10am AEST.

“We are working on this as a priority. We will keep you updated on the progress," ATO assistant commissioner Colin Walker said in a statement.

“We are aware some internal and external systems are intermittently unavailable, including ato.gov.au. This may affect the ability for some users to access a number of ATO systems," the agency advised.

At 2:15pm the agency advised its website and online services were progressively coming back online.

UPDATE: The cause of the outage has been revealed - it's another storage crash.

Just last week the ATO released its report into the outages of its HPE 3PAR storage area network (SAN) in December 2016 and February this year.

The report revealed that poor system design and maintenance by ATO contractor HPE were to blame. The cause of the outages included improperly fitted cables, inactive monitoring tools, and a design that promoted SAN performance over stability and resilience.

The report found there were big warning signs in the lead up to the downtime. The ATO promised to rebuild its internal IT infrastructure capability as a result of the damage.

The agency implemented a new SAN in April. The cause of the latest outage is currently unclear.