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Australia's Census site overloaded as Twitter comes up with their own questions

Who didn't see this coming?

Johnny Lieu

on August 9, 2016

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Well, who didn't see this coming?

It's Aug. 9 a.k.a. census night in Australia, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics' site seems to have buckled under the pressure.

For the first time, Australians were meant to be able to enter their vital statistics online, instead of on the traditional slabs of paper. But that doesn't seem to be going as planned.

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As of 8:00 p.m. AEST, the census website has been unable to cope with demand for many Australians, and will not load, even for this reporter.

Like clockwork, Australians used another functioning online platform, Twitter, to complain using the hashtag #CensusFail. Even those who managed to get onto the site reported they were unable to save their details while completing the census.

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An ABS spokesperson was not available to comment, but at 8:38 p.m. its Twitter account acknowledged in a message that the ABS and Census websites were experiencing an outage.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

You really shouldn't panic, however: The real due date for completing the census is Sep. 23. "We allow two weeks for people to do their forms and put them in before we start the field visitation phase," Chris Libreri, general manager of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Census and Statistical Network Division, told News Corp.

So feel free to have a Bex and a lie down. You can take your time.

For now, if you don't have any good Netflix to watch, you can join the others making up their own, improved census questions with the hashtag #bettercensusquestions on Twitter.

It's a more fun and less stressful way of giving your personal details away, it seems.