The Great Stuff-Up

Some of you folks might have heard of Australias Census kamoffel.
August 9 was Census night, where the Government takes a snapshot of the population, it is done every 5 years.
This year the first time electronic, we where advised to do it electronically whereas previously there was paper forms only. ( Could order paper if you where prepared to wait on the phone for 3-4 hours)
Well to cut a long story short, by mid afternoon the server started to crash, by 8.30pm the government shut down the server, apparently to protect citizens privacy.
Now comes the good part foreign hackers apparently American where active in "denial of service attacks "
(Oh...you bad boys).
The real story though, provided by independent IT experts is the IT company being paid $470.000 to ensure the work done by IBM, that was paid $9.6 million to develop the system was a woefully underpowered train-wreck right from the beginning.
Now a most interesting thing is, anyone using Window 10's Edge Browser was not able to connect at all to the server, windows10 and any other browser IE11 or Chrome, Macks Safari are OK.

 

You guys only spent $9.6 million on a census and we wasted $26 million in NZ on whether we should change our flag!!! And we decided by Referendum to keep our old flag.

 

Tony, we do have a Government funded Hospital system which enables free medical care and ops. Unfortunately because we have supported this through our Taxes during working years, we now have a waiting list for ops unless you suffer a stroke or heart attack in A&E, you will be sent home to wait for an empty bed.
Bill, your census debacle reminds me of our Education Dept. pay stuff up. They engaged an Aussie software firm to set up Novopay, that is still having problems 5 years down the track and cost zillions to develop. Probably the software programmers having melt downs in your hot climate. Turnbull may have a lower head count if IBM staff go walk-about.

 

IBM late yesterday got the system back on track, but people are still reporting that they have problems, IBM stated that it should not have happened.
PM Turnbull said on radio" Heads Will Roll " My preferred head to roll would be his. We still have to do that Sensus $180.- penalty if you don't.