Census 2016: outage due to 'overcautious' response, not hacking, government says

Bureau of Statistics and government deny cyberattack took place, instead blaming it on a 'confluence of events'

The federal government and Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have explained the outage of the online census was the result of a systems failure and an "overcautious" response to a denial of service attack.

At a press conference on Wednesday to explain the outage since about 7.30pm on Tuesday, the small business minister, Michael McCormack, blamed the failure on a "confluence of events" but said the system had not been breached and no data was lost.