The websites of a string of government agencies experienced embarrassing errors on Monday afternoon, which caused domain names to erroneously display the home pages of separate departments.

The errors, which rendered home pages all but unusable, appeared to begin early Monday afternoon. Domain names erroneously cycled through a range of webpages from separate agencies or departments.

The domain name for the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) website, for example, wrongly cycled between the home pages of My Health Record, IP Australia, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, and the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

for some reason the website of the Australian National Audit Office has been replaced with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority



2 minutes ago, it redirected to IP Australia https://t.co/M5rgzC5tLx pic.twitter.com/XutLSa677p — Naaman Zhou (@naamanzhou) January 7, 2019

Similar issues plagued the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC) and the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA).

The errors were caused by configuration changes by the service that hosts government websites, GovCMS, which is provided by the Department of Finance.

The GovCMS website itself cycled through the pages of the Australian Financial Security Authority and the Tax Practitioners Board within minutes on Monday.

A spokesman for the Department of Finance said the errors affected the sites for less than two hours. The department said there was no malicious activity and no data was put at risk.

“Earlier today, a configuration change was made to the content distribution network that protects GovCMS sites,” the spokesman said.

“The change resulted in an unintended redirection of some websites. Normal service was restored within two hours of the issue occurring.”

Now the website for GovCMS – who manage government websites – redirects to the wrong website https://t.co/u2me2qXTFX pic.twitter.com/5QyEST1LjI — Naaman Zhou (@naamanzhou) January 7, 2019

The audit office has asked its vendor to investigate the problems as a matter of urgency.

“We are aware of the issue and we have logged a ticket with our vendor, who are investigating. Once the issue is resolved we will be requesting a post incident review from the vendor,” a spokesman told Guardian Australia.

The ACNC described the problems as “technical”, and said it was “working to restore” its website as soon as possible.

The ACNC website is currently experiencing technical issues. We are working to restore it as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and apologies for the inconvenience. — ACNC (@ACNC_gov_au) January 7, 2019

There is no evidence that the websites were deliberately targeted in a cyber attack.