The Australian Taxation Office has restored access to some of its online services, but concerns remain that large amounts of data have been lost after it suffered a "world-first" technical glitch to equipment from Hewlett Packard Enterprise more than 24 hours earlier.

Tax officials were reportedly told to work from home for the second successive day, due to inability to access some key internal systems, and citizens were unable to access its website after a failure in the hardware that stores the ATO's data.

The systems went down on Monday after a failure of the HPE storage network, which was upgraded in November 2015 with technology news website ITNews reporting the loss of 1 petabyte of data, which it is still attempting to recover.

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The tech disaster comes hot on the heels of the Australian Bureau of Statistics and IBM failing to manage the 2016 Census, and raises further questions about the ability of government departments to deliver modern online systems properly.

In a statement the ATO's acting chief information officer Steve Hamilton said no taxpayer information had been compromised, and blamed HPE's equipment, as well as a failure for its backup system to kick in and save the day as planned.