The government is encouraging people to fill out their census form online, and by law everyone must do it by midnight - but the Statistics Minister is also warning the system could get over-loaded.
UPDATE: Around 7.15, the census site was accessible and performing fine.
The government is encouraging people to fill out their census form online, and by law everyone must do it by midnight - but the Statistics Minister is also warning the system could get over-loaded.
Statistics Minister Maurice Williamson says there may be system delays this evening as online census numbers crack one million.
Mr Williamson expects "huge numbers" of people to go online tonight to fill out their forms.
“The system will only be able to process 200,000 forms an hour – that’s our maximum capacity,” he told NBR ONLINE.
“There may be problems along the way. However it won’t knock out anyone who is already in the site and it won’t slow it down. It just tells people to log in later if there are too many people logged on.”
Mr Williamson wants half the population to fill out census forms online.
The target may still be reached – 400,000 online forms were submitted last night and by early afternoon today (the official day of the census), a million people had logged in online.
The minister's warning about overloading comes on the same day that the Mighty River Power IPO pre-registeration site was inaccessible for most of the morning.
