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Government

System update pulls ATO offline

Following a week of outages from various banks, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is the latest to be hit by a service interruption, with a patch causing the office's website to go offline mid-yesterday.
Written by Luke Hopewell, Contributor

Following a week of outages from various banks, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is the latest to be hit by a service interruption, with a patch causing the office's website to go offline mid-yesterday.

Out of service sign

The ATO is the latest website to be pulled offline because of security patches this week. (Out of service image by Ed Schipul, CC BY-SA 2.0)

In a statement from the tax office, it was revealed that a routine software patch was to blame for the outage on its ato.gov.au site.

"The problem was caused by a data corruption during a normal system update process," the ATO said in a statement to ZDNet Australia.

The site was hit by the outage at 11am yesterday, with functionality restored by 2:45pm.

The ATO's site troubles comes amidst a week of website woes, with Westpac's online banking affected by a similar patch update earlier this week, and the Commonwealth Bank's EFTPOS and ATM network went down on Monday, as well as ANZ also suffering an outage at the hands of an unknown glitch.

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