The outage could also have significant impact on welfare recipients, who use MyGov to contact Centrelink

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

As thousands of Australians try to submit their tax returns, the main online portal for federal government services has gone down.

In an outage that will also affect thousands of welfare recipients across the country, the MyGov site appeared to be unavailable on Friday morning, returning an error.

The Department of Human Services said via MyGov’s Twitter account there were “technical difficulties” with the website.

“We are urgently investigating the issue and we’re working hard to fix this as quickly as possible,” it repeatedly said in replies to people reporting the error.

Income tax cuts 2019 calculator: how much money you will get – explained Read more

A department of human services spokeswoman said: “Some services, including myGov, are currently unavailable or experiencing slowness. The department is working on the issue and apologises for the inconvenience.”

“We’re continuing to monitor the performance of our services closely, and in the past hour have seen signs of significant improvement.”

The spokeswoman later added that the department would conduct a “thorough investigation into how the outage occurred” after its services were fully up and running”.

The Australian Taxation Office also tweeted that “some of our services (incl. the portals & our online services via myGov) are currently unavailable or experiencing slowness”.

In a statement, the ATO said it was a “technical issue with a communications switch” and not as a result of more people lodging a tax return.

The outage could also have significant impact on welfare recipients, who use MyGov to contact Centrelink and avoid having their income support temporarily cut off.

Centrelink was directing people to call to report their income and attendance at compulsory activities and extended the deadline to 7:30pm.

“We’re sorry for any inconvenience this outage has caused for customers and have put in place measures to ensure they are not disadvantaged by this,” a spokeswoman said.

Centrelink (@Centrelink) Hi there, we'd like to let you know that if people need to report employment income while myGov investigate this, they can report by calling 133 276. We apologise for any inconvenience.

More than a million people have filed tax returns since the start of July seeking to take advantage of newly legislated tax cuts. The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, tweeted that more than 1.1 million tax returns had been lodged by Thursday morning compared with 600,000 by the same time last year.

Josh Frydenberg (@JoshFrydenberg) The @ato_gov_au has received over 1 million tax returns for the 18/19 year!

As of this morning over 1.1 million tax returns have been lodged compared to around 600,000 at the same time last year. Despite Labor’s opposition, Australians have now got the tax cuts they voted for!

The new single-touch payroll system means most workers have to access the online system to retrieve their payroll summaries for their tax returns this year.

This month the government passed its $158bn tax package that it campaigned for at the federal election in May. As a result, people earning up to $126,000 will be entitled to a refund of between $255 and $1,080 when they submit their 2018-19 tax return.

The ATO said 390,000 refunds with the value of $882m have been paid into accounts as of this morning, and another 110,000 refunds worth a total of $292m will be paid this afternoon, for a total of $1.2bn.

You can find out what refund you’ll be entitled to in the Guardian’s tax calculator guide.