Census 2016
Update (10/08/2016): More in today's bookmarks.
@ABSCensus (July 20):
"The online Census form can handle 1,000,000 form submissions every hour. That's twice the capacity we expect to need."
Paul Versteege, policy coordinator for the Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association (August 2):
"Despite the ABS putting on 300 concurrent phone lines, many of those applying for paper census forms cannot get through. [...] The Census Inquiry phone line is overwhelmed and people are being told to call back later. Many people are not online and are concerned they won't receive their paper forms in time and will be fined $180 a day for every day they are late."
Business Insider (August 9)
"Australia's first online census appears to have crashed as millions of households attempt to log in on Tuesday night."
@ABSCensus (August 9):
"The ABS & Census websites are currently experiencing an outage. We're working to restore the service. We will keep you updated. Thank you."
Trevor Long (August 9):
"The real issue for Australians, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is the $469,367.50 spent on 'Load Testing' to ensure this very thing didn't happen. [...] Through open tenders, the Australian Bureau of Statistics awarded the contract to 'Design, development and implementation of eCensus Solution 2016' to IBM. They built a pretty darn slick solution that created a platform by which all Australians could fill out the 2016 Census — at a cost of $9,606,725.00. The ABS paid an Aussie company 'Revolution IT Pty Ltd' $469,367.50 across three tenders to undertake 'Load Testing Services for Census 2016'. $325,000 of that was for software licences to get the equipment required to do the testing, the rest we can assume was for the teams to actually undertake the testing."
ABS.GOV.AU/CENSUS: Lotus Domino, Google Web Toolkit, J2EE
Shane Harmon (August 9):
"Australia to open borders to everyone as #census2016 reveals dramatic population drop from 21.5m in 2011 to just 719."
@ABSCensus (August 10):
"We apologise for the inconvenience. The 2016 online Census form was subject to four Denial of Service attacks of varying nature & severity."
The Guardian (August 10):
"David Kalisch, the ABS chief statistician, told ABC news radio the site was subject to a sequence of denial of service attacks emanating from overseas. He says the ABS shut down the site to 'protect the integrity of the data', rather than the site crashing."