I find Michael McCormack's news release comments about the problem simply unbelievable.
He says “There was a large scale denial of service attempt to the census website and online form. A denial of service is an attempt to block people from accessing a website. Following, and because of this, there was a hardware failure,”
And then in the next sentence says “I will be clear from the outset, this was not an attack. Nor was it a hack but rather, it was an attempt to frustrate the collection of bureau of statistics census data."
Does the man actually understand what a Denial of Service Attack is - by definition its an ATTACK !
Maybe we should refer him to the same source most schoolkids use to complete their homework assignments across the world - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
. . . so he can do his own homework before telling lies to the public to try and push this under the carpet.
But its much much worse than this - a DOS attack (as has been stated) is often either a cover or a part of a mechanism that is used to penetrate a system's normal securities - and of course he goes on to deny that there was any compromise - like he knows what even happened in simple terms let alone what actually really went on !
He is a fool to say an attack is not an attack !
Its laughable, except that its so serious.
But I must admit I think Marc is probably right too - their systems just could never cope with a majority of the population all trying to use it at the same time.
I tried about 100 times and gave up - I wont be using the system full stop, but I was also was never going to allow them to breach 110 years of legal intent and tradition of anonymous statistical information collection not to collect to names and addresses.