The federal government's COVID-19 hub, Australia.gov.au, was in six hours repurposed to be the one-stop catalogue for information on the virus itself, as well as welfare assistance available to citizens and other coronavirus-related material.
While the time to market was exceptional for a government site, it took a website outage and people queueing amid social distancing measures to force the change.
On Monday 23 March 2020, the federal government's online service portal MyGov crashed[1] when many Australians tried to determine if they qualified for support from the country's Centrelink scheme.
Around the nation, queues around the block at Centrelink offices formed as first-time social security recipients desperately tried to make sense of what was happening by going into shopfronts in person, due to the website failing.
The minister in charge of government services Stuart Robert said the portal suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack[2] while simultaneously blaming the outage on legitimate traffic that pushed past the 55,000 concurrent users limit set by government.
Those words were barely two hours old when Robert stood up in Parliament to say it was merely 95,000 people trying to connect to myGov that had triggered a DDoS alert, and not an attack at all.
"We've gone from 6,000 to 50,000 to 150,000 all in the space of, a matter of a day. And tonight, they're working to boost it again. I would say to Australians, yes, we are terribly sorry, but at the same time, we are asking Australians, even in these most difficult of circumstances, to be patient. Everyone is doing their best," Prime Minister Scott Morrison later clarified[3].
Speaking at the Digital Transformation Agency's (DTA) Disruption and Change Digital Summit on Tuesday, DTA digital taskforce lead Lucy