Switching web service providers and providing almost $40 million from the federal budget means the census 2021 website should be safe from crashing at the crucial time this evening.
Digital technologies put an abundance of data at our fingertips, but we must ensure questions of what should, and should not, be measured are answered before we use them in official statistics.
The evidence the Census servers suffered a DDoS attack is weak. A simpler explanation is that they buckled under load of Australians filling out their Census forms as asked.
Despite assuring Australians its systems were load tested and secure, the Census site went offline at a crucial time. Could the ABS have avoided such an embarrasing failure?