ABS claims Census website 'back up and running' as PM declares 'heads will roll'
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has said the Census website is back up and running following Tuesday night’s bungle, however many are still unable to access the site.
When Yahoo7 tried to access the site at 3.10pm and were still unable to view the site.
The update comes as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared heads would roll over the website failure.
PM lashes out at ABS over #CensusFail
The Prime Minister has lashed Australian Bureau of Statistics over Tuesday night's Census failure, saying "measures that ought to have been in place...were not".
The website for the Census, which was to be conducted online by the ABS for the first time, was shut down on Tuesday night after a series of cyber attacks.
"This has clearly been a failure on the part of the ABS," Malcolm Turnbull told Sydney radio station 2GB.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull admits there were 'serious failure' with the Census. Source: AAP
He said concerns about the security of the site raised in the lead up to Tuesday should have been addressed.
The site was still offline while the PM spoke.
It's a patient wait as the ABS seeks to restore the crashed site. Source: AAP
The ABS has not yet confirmed when the website will be back up and running for the 20 million or more people who have yet to complete the compulsory survey.
The ABS was in damage control on Wednesday after its first online Census trial ended in disaster when the website crashed and then became unavailable, with conflicting reports coming from the ABS and the federal government about exactly what went wrong.
MP Michael McCormack (left) and Australian Statistician David Kalisch. Photo: AAP
While the ABS cited foreign hackers as being responsible for the crash, Census minister Michael McCormack contradicted this report, claiming the crash was not due to an attack.
"This was not an attack, nor was it a hack," Mr McCormack told reporters on Wednesday, despite ABS Chief Statistician David Kalisch describing the events leading up the shutdown as "malicious" and "an attack" earlier on Wednesday.
However, the ABS has confirmed no data has been compromised or lost.
ABS respond to Census disaster
Census site crashed several times throughout Tuesday night, the work of foreign hackers. Source: ABS
Just after 7.30pm on Tuesday, a number of events simultaneously led to the crash, according to an ABS media statement.
These included a large increase in online traffic, a router becoming overloaded, leading to a hardware failure, a fourth "denial of service" attempt, meaning a user was denied access to the website and a false alarm in some system monitoring information.
"Had these events occurred in isolation, the online system would have been maintained," the statement read.
More than two million forms had been successfully submitted and stored before the website crashed, according to the ABS.
Despite numerous attempts to contact the ABS for further information on Wednesday night, AAP did not receive a response.
