Services Australia said the number of outages was almost half of what it was in 2019-20. It also provided detail on its IT expenditure, with AU$1.48 billion spent last financial year.
Services Australia has taken the opportunity to say myGov outages were slashed by almost half in 2020-21, when compared to the year prior. In response to questions taken on notice during Senate Estimates in May, Services Australia said during 2020-21, there were four planned and six unplanned outages to the myGov platform. “Planned outages typically last a maximum of three hours, and the average resolution time for the five unplanned outages was 41 minutes,” it said. Offering further information, Services Australia general manager Hank Jongen told ZDNet the agency has “significantly bolstered” myGov over the last two years so it now has the largest capacity of any authenticated online platform in Australia. “We continue to make improvements to increase the capabilities of our platforms, including myGov, which helps us address service issues as quickly as possible,” he said. Jongen said the six unplanned outages were due to “underpinning hardware and software issues” and that the number reduced from 11 in the previous financial year. The duration of the six outages were 13 minutes,14 minutes,18 minutes,34 minutes,64 minutes, and 96 minutes. “Once services were restored, there were no further service impacts for customers,” he added. In March last year, myGov crashed when many Australians tried to determine if they qualified for COVID-19 support from the country’s Centrelink scheme. Former Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert was quick to claim the portal suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, however it was simply 95,000 people trying to connect to myGov that had triggered a DDoS alert, and not an attack at all. “We’ve gone from 6,000 to 50,000 to 150,000 all in the space of, a matter of a day.
