ATO hit by online services outage

The Australian Taxation Office is facing a widespread outage of its online services portals for business reporting.

The agency acknowledged the problems in a tweet at 9:40am AEDT on Tuesday morning, though system availability dashboards show the issues first emerged just before 6:30am. 

“Our online services are currently unavailable,” the ATO said on social media. “We’re working on a fix as a priority & will provide an update when the issue is resolved.”

Affected services include the ATO’s new tax agent platform, online services for agents, which just emerged from public beta testing last week, as well as other tax agent and BAS portals.

The ATO's online services for individuals appear unaffected.

A spokesperson told iTnews the issues were affecting its "online portals and other business functions".

The agent online services dashboard indicates the ATO has “identified the problem and are working on restoring this service as soon as possible”.

Another dashboard for standard business reporting (SBR) status indicates the ATO is experiencing a full surge of its production environment.

“SBR1 and SBR2 production are currently experiencing a full outage and are unavailable,” the ATO’s enterprise solutions and technology assistant commissioner Michael Rowell said.

“We are working to resolve this as a matter of priority and will let you know when the issues have been resolved.”

Update 2:49pm: the ATO has advised that "the tax professional portals and online services for agents ... are unlikely to be returned today".

Update 5/06 9:00am: All issues affecting ATO online services have been resolved.