9 August will go down in history as #Censusfail after international hackers managed to close down the system, resulting in across-nation outage and uproar.
This came after almost two months of increasing community concern regarding privacy and security as a result of moving the Census online. While community angst soared, so did the number of arrogant communications from the ABS and Federal Government.
As 7.30pm hit on 9 August, Twitter went ballistic as people complained that the website could not be reached, and try checking the connection or check the proxy and the firewall.
This was despite ABS telling Fairfax that it was confident the database could cope with 1 million submissions every hour. “That’s twice the capacity we expect to need.” Not only could the ABS not handle one million submissions every hour, the communications failed dismally too. It wasn’t until much later in the evening that the agency admitted defeat, advising Australians the site would not be back online that night.
In the meantime, the Prime Minister had managed to fill his online survey successfully, and had tweeted proudly about the fact. This further irritated the nation’s tweeters who responded with taunts about “Fraudband” and the lack of a National Broadband Network.
By the morning, the media was ready to pounce and so it did. And the ABS’ chiefs failed in their attempts to explain what had happened. Instead, they reacted by blaming ‘international sources”, thus playing into initial community concerns about privacy and security.
Lessons learned for communications folk
In our view, the writing was on the wall from the start. #Censusfail had already started with snooty dismissals of the community’s concerns about privacy.
Secondly, was there ever a plan in place in case of this type of spectacular crash? Or was the communications team or their advice ignored? Was the team brought in the moment the system crashed?
Our approach to crisis planning is based on the need to be open and have clear messages for the many different audiences the minute the crisis starts. In this issue, there should have been live updates rather than relying on semi-automated responses.
Arrogance is to be avoided at all times. Today and over the next few weeks, the ABS and the government have a lot of remedial work to do. Neither at the moment seems willing to eat humble pie and admit they were wrong.
