An error message is seen on the Census website. Picture: Joel Carrett

But, in fact, the government knew about the problems much earlier in the day and kept the issues under wraps.

The site had already seen two “attacks” before 3pm, yet ABS chief statistician David Kalisch held a press conference after the fact reassuring Australians the Census was on track.

Mr Kalisch refused to answer why the site compromises weren’t revealed earlier.

“All planning and strategies were put into place to prepare for any denials of service, to prepare for any events that occurred last night,” Mr Kalisch told reporters today.

“The good thing is it was safeguarded. People’s information was protected. The good thing is that no data has been lost. The good thing is the firewalls held up and the actual ABS has been shown to be — whilst they have been very cautious, they have been shown to be responsible.”

So who is taking responsibility for keeping the country in the dark? No one.

In a press conference today, the minister responsible for the Census, Michael McCormack, detailed the timeline of events.

Federal Minister for Small Business Michael McCormack. Picture: Adrian MuscatSource:AAP

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) chief statistician David Kalisch. Picture: Adrian MuscatSource:AAP

Alastair MacGibbon, special adviser to Prime Minister on cyber security.Source:News Corp Australia

The first incident — or “denial of service” — came at 10.09am yesterday, as Australia was preparing for its big night. The ABS online monitoring systems detected a “significant increase in traffic” on the Census site.

At the time it was only a small breach, lasting 11 minutes and a website outage of about five minutes, but it rang alarm bells in head office.

“The traffic increase was suspected to be a denial of service and investigations into it were commenced by both ABS and IBM,” Mr McCormack said.

At 11.46am, another increase in traffic, or a “second attempt” as Mr McCormack described it, was observed, consistent with a second denial of service.

Four minutes later, at 11.50am, the ABS and IBM employed a “denial of service mitigation response plan, which includes blocking of all international traffic”.

At this stage, the incident was reported to the Australian signals directorate to seek any advice on prevention of further incidents or any intelligence related threat to the ABS.

Still, the public was left in the dark.

The problems persisted.

At 4.58pm, another attempt. At 6.15pm, another.

But it wasn’t until 7.30pm when the issues stepped up a notch.

“At 7.45pm, the ABS made the decision to shut down the online form to protect the system from further incidents,” Mr McCormack said.

“My office was informed of the Census website outage at 8.10pm. At 8.14pm my office called to inform the site was unavailable.”

It wasn’t until 8.38pm when Census officials alerted the public to a problem.

Despite noting they were “working to restore the service”, no one informed the public until 10.59pm that the website was down completely and “won’t be restored tonight”.

The irony? One minute later, the system was restored but “not brought online as a precaution”.

So why the long wait? Why did it take so long for the government to let us know?

According to Mr McCormack, it was a series of events that couldn’t be helped.

He says he wasn’t informed of the outage until 8.10pm and after numerous voicemail messages to Mr Kalisch and the Census program manager, he got on the phone with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at 8.32pm.

That call apparently took one minute, because at 8.33pm, Mr McCormack was on the phone to the Treasurer, Scott Morrison.

Despite his detailed timeline, Mr McCormack missed discussing the crucial four hours during peak time last night.

Mr McCormack’s timeline lasts until 8.50pm, but there was silence from the official Census Twitter account until 10.59pm.

Mr McCormack’s only statement so far regarding those times is this: “I remained in constant contact with Mr Kalisch and provided the PM, as well as the Treasurer, with updates as information became available throughout the night.”

Shame he didn’t bother to update us.

— youngma@news.com.au