AWKS: The Census Website Is Crashing, Exactly Like They Said It Wouldn’t

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Published

August 9, 2016

This is exactly like the Titanic if, instead of being a big boat they said was impossible to sink, the Titanic was a bunch of servers they said wouldn’t go down while people tried to do the census that absolutely did.

Despite the ABS claiming that the system was sufficiently tested and ready for the estimated 16 million people logging in to give away their personal details to some statistics nerds hidden in a bunker somewhere, the website has been intermittently going down tonight, with a complete outage occurring at time of writing.

Those people lucky enough to receive their login code who were then unlucky enough to have the site conk out on them while they were filling it out or even before they could start were not very impressed:

Actual photo of @ABSCensus server.#Census #CensusFail #Censless pic.twitter.com/ms9Wh46wgG

— Matthew Howard (@MatthewamHoward) August 9, 2016

I give up, just go to my Facebook page, it’s all there #MyCensus #censusfail #census2016

— Trudi (@trudeofthecluse) August 9, 2016

Meanwhile, at the ABS, #CensusFail pic.twitter.com/dOtIlmAJR9

— Cameron Colwell (@Cameron___c) August 9, 2016

@ABSCensus @ABSStats #Census website needs help. pic.twitter.com/X5gvP0thuw

— techAU (@techAU) August 9, 2016

And the ABS have taken the veeery interesting approach of pretending that isn’t actually down and every single person is making it up:

ABS reckons the site is running fine.. “must be a local issue” local to everyone but themselves. #censusfail https://t.co/Fqlo2DewyT

— David Olsen (@DDsD) August 9, 2016