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. And tonight, they’re working to boost it again.
