If you’re an engineer at the Australian Tax Office, you’d be spending all of today frantically hoping you didn’t accidentally leave that bottle of Tres Commas Tequila resting on a backspace key yesterday.

The ATO suffered an almighty and, frankly, unprecedented hardware failure yesterday that not only knocked out their whole online portal, but resulted in the loss of ONE PETABYTE of data.

1 PB. That’s equal to 1,000 terabytes. Or, in far more practical terms, the equivalent of approximately 125,628,140 mp3 copies of Bryan Adams and Mel C‘s 1998 hit ‘When You’re Gone‘ at a reasonably high quality 320kbps.

Y’know, an absolute shitload of data.

The crash was triggered by the “catastrophic” collapse of part of its storage solution systems, which were being handled by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The subsequent implosion of the Storage Area Network caused the massive loss of data; an issue that wasn’t helped in the slightest by backup systems that failed to kick in immediately, meaning the corruption issues from the primary server were replicated on the backup.

Or, in layman’s terms, everything went full bung real quick.

According to the ATO, the hardware failure is the first of its kind anywhere in the world, meaning the rebuilding and data recovery process is taking a lot longer than it ordinarily might have. The hardware solution that bit the dust had only been upgraded just over a year ago.

As a result of the failure, ato.gov.au, the tax agent portal, and the remainder of its online services remain down. The ATO had hoped to get at least the website back online by this afternoon, but at the time of writing it was still offline.

ATO officials were quick to stress that the data loss did not include sensitive taxpayer information, which is bad news for those of you (literally everyone in the PEDESTRIAN.TV editorial department included) hoping the whole thing would be an ‘Office Space‘-style slate clean on the ole’ HECS debt.

So while we might still owe the government money for school until we’re all very dead, rest assured that there’s boffins at the ATO who are having a very, very bad day today.

ATO and HPE staff are in the process of rebuilding both the primary storage server, and its backup, and are working to restore the data from prior backups.

But still, until the servers are back up and running we can all hold out hope of waking up tomorrow utterly debt-free as far as Uni is concerned.

And if that happens, we’ll meet y’all at the pub.

Source: IT News.