The Census Did Not Go Great; ABS Says Overseas Hackers Worked To Bring Websites Down

Remember how we were meant to do the Census last night? Never mind.

Aussies eager to share the intimate details of their living arrangements were faced with an unresponsive website on Tuesday evening, despite Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) head Chris Libreri previously saying it would have no problem bearing the load of visitors.

It took a few hours for the ABS Twitter account to stop prompting users to complete their Census online and confirm that the Census websites were indeed "experiencing an outage".

Several hours later, the ABS noted that "the service won't be restored tonight", reassuring Australians that they would not be fined for failing to complete their forms (on account of their shonky servers).

ABS & Census website are unavailable. The service won't be restored tonight. We will update you in AM. We apologise for the inconvenience.

— Census Australia (@ABSCensus) August 9, 2016

There will be no fines for completing the Census after Aug 9. There’s still plenty of time to complete the Census. Thanks for your patience.

— Census Australia (@ABSCensus) August 9, 2016

According to the ABC, several hundred thousand dollars had been spent by the government on "load testing" the websites, anticipating one million form completions per hour.

Though it's not known how many were unable to complete their Census forms last night, the ABS expected a full two-thirds of Australians to do theirs online; meaning, about 16 million of an estimated 24 million citizens could have faced issues in entering their data. (We'd check the exact, current number of registered Aussies, but, you know, the ABS site is still down.)

In the cold light of morning, an ABS spokesperson revealed the real reason for the website going out: It had apparently been attacked by overseas hackers four times.

Following the fourth attack, around 7:30pm EST, the ABS took the site down as a precaution.

Somewhat ironically, social media users were outraged by the outage, despite boycott plans and widespread criticism of the 2016 Census' new data collection and storage processes (made all the more concerning given the way in which the Census websites were hacked by bad actors). Earlier this week, that protest had been given the hashtag #CensusFail. If only the people who invent hashtags knew what was yet to come.

At least the 'this is fine' dog was still available for use.

This is fine #CensusFail pic.twitter.com/Ds3gOFHCFS

— Tom Horn (@RedBlueThing) August 9, 2016

.@ABSCensus just keep telling people do the census its fine this is fine (sincere apologies to @kcgreenn) #AusCensus pic.twitter.com/nLBfvfwuQn

— Justin Wake (@movups) August 9, 2016

#censusfail pic.twitter.com/xRgCuK0lFh

— Mark:Di-Stefano (@MarkDiStef) August 9, 2016

Though the ABS team and the government are no doubt hard at work trying to figure out how to salvage Census 2016, you needn't spend the next few days frantically refreshing your browser.

You actually have until September 23 to fill in your form, as per Lifehacker. Seems the ABS setting an unofficial deadline several weeks after Census night was a smart idea.

Though, it kind of makes the tagline "one moment to make a difference" redundant.

More news as it develops.

Photo: ABS.