The Dark World of NDIS Systems Outages
We hear of yet another NDIS digital transformation. But what hasn’t been made so public, is the dark and alarming world of NDIS systems outages.
Between June 2023 and July 2025, the running tally of NDIS 'planned' systems outages is a whopping 836.25 hours, which is 34.8 days.
This year alone between July 2024 and July 2025, the planned NDIS systems outages amount to 438 hours, or 18.15 days.
And in just the past few weeks, the NDIS systems have been offline with multi-systems outages for an extraordinary 90 hours.
This tally does not include the many unplanned outages, payment disruptions and just plain lack of accessibility. And the frequency and severity of the outages over these past few years, appears to be worsening. Track something and the trend emerges.
These massive outages happen just about every month. Sometimes several times per month. The NDIS systems are almost a part-time Monday-Friday affair: part-time digital government where the shop gets shut down on weekends. Sweet.
Anyone work on weekends?
What this means is that businesses dependent on NDIS systems cannot function on the many weekends of NDIS systems outages. Participants cannot access NDIS systems, lodge and review payments, making it very difficult for people to understand exactly where their plan budget is up to. Stuff that Participants get pinged for.
And as documented in Parliamentary submissions and other reports, cyber and fraud vulnerabilities are heightened during large-scale systems shutdowns.
This level of 'planned' outages is unheard of and just should not happen - and speaks to a broader problem of the lack of modern technology management capability and lack of technology oversight capability at the NDIA Board level.
But what is deeply concerning, is that most of these planned outages occur with very little notice. In July we saw outages with less than a day’s notice. There is no excuse for this: it's just basic change management.
These outages take an economy-wide system (NDIS) completely offline, on a regular basis, with little or no notice: the NDIS world effectively goes dark.
Imagine if this happened to your bank. Or airlines. Or border control systems. Or data centre provider. What we are witnessing is a national system with no resilience or redundancy.
So to the big news just breaking, is that the NDIA is after another digital transformation strategy and roadmap. And hot on the heels of this call for another digital transformation roadmap, is the Agency's admission that it is under considerable internal time pressure.
All this has to be seen together with the NDIA RFT in February, for the provision of Needs Assessment Tool(s).
Back in February, I explored the unrealistic timeframes - as well as outages and data defects - in my commentary on the NDIA February RFT.
Essentially what the February RFT was about, was the NDIA wants to build a novel algorithm (the Needs Assessment Tool), that doesn’t currently exist anywhere in the world, and integrate it with its systems, that are known to be defective, in an environment where data migration from SAP to PACE has not occurred, with zero capability and experience in ever having done this before.
All this is after having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its highly problematic PACE system by Salesforce, and questionable procurement practices.
Alarm bells should be ringing at the highest level of government. This is now no longer about the fantastical 'NDIS Reforms' - and never was.
What is on display is layer upon layer of data and technology risk - translating into catastrophic human risk - driven by an Agency under time pressure to build novel algorithms, yet clearly devoid of fundamental capability. The NDIS systems outages - planned and unplanned - are a symptom of serious capability distress.
Addressing the fundamentals - safety, lawfulness, and resilience - of the NDIS systems is urgent. It has been urgent for a decade. But politics driving 'considerable internal time pressure' does not resolve the systemic urgency, and never has. I feel for the many good people in the NDIA.
More new tech and algorithms won't make NDIS systems lawful or avoid harm or deal with risk.
Look, the NDIS NDIA systems need a complete overhaul- actually, these systems need to be completely replaced from the ground up - and I will be the biggest cheerleader when this happens.
So is the news of yet another NDIS digital transformation, good news, or not? Time will tell, but my crystal ball has a bankable track record. But with the magnitude of technology turmoil compounded by the hazards of political time pressure, there will inevitably be more outages.