Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he's angry that systems were not in place to prevent the closure of the Bureau of Statistics census website on Tuesday night.
Mr Turnbull says there will be serious consequences for the failure.
Malcolm Turnbull says measures were not in place to repel the sort of attacks which threatened the census website.
He says there were serious failures with the conduct of the Australia Bureau of Statistics national survey, which was predicted to have many more online respondents this time than in the last census, in 2011, so was being conducted primarily over the internet.
Mr Turnbull says the failure of prevention measures was compounded by hardware problems.
He has refused to say who will be made accountable because of the fiasco but has foreshadowed very serious consequences.
And he's blaming the Bureau of Statistics and IBM for being unprepared for the cyber attacks.
