Whilst outages happen all the time, it seems a few of the biggest services had blackouts this month leaving lots of frustrated people. This July saw the outage of MyGov at the height of tax return season and the passport e-gates outage that left thousands of passengers waiting for hours.
MyGov:
Since mid-morning on Thursday, the MyGov website has been experiencing periodic outages. Despite the MyGov Twitter account confirming that the website was up and writing; at the time of writing, downdetector.com says the website is still causing users issues. Since the MyGov website is a centralised system for all the government’s major services, thousands of people who were trying to submit their tax returns and access other services such as Medicare, had issues and continue to still have issues which has caused a lot of frustration.
Sydney Airport E-Gates:
Similarly, on Monday morning the passport E Gates at Sydney International Airport went down leaving thousands of passengers in queues and hundreds of flights delayed across the country. Whilst the Australian Border Force attributed the outage to a technical issue, they would not state further what the issue was.
ATO Text Scam:
Whilst this isn’t the fault of the Australian Tax Office, hackers have taken advantage of tax return season with a new scam. This time it’s in the form of a WhatsApp message. The message tells you that the ATO has a certain amount of money to “refund” you along with a link. The fake text also requests payments through unconventional methods (e.g. Bitcoin payment) and they also ask for identification such as a picture of your driver’s license, passports, etc. The ATO has stated that they will not contact people about personal information through WhatsApp. You can report fraudulent texts/calls to their website.
Don’t let downtime stop your business
Downtime is frustrating for your customers, team members and management, it means your business can’t run until the issue’s fixed. With Managed IT Services you can take a proactive approach to your IT. Manage your business’s infrastructure and IT to prevent and detect problems before they arise.
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