Daily Times

The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) on Sunday announced a schedule for four hours daily shutdown of its website till August 30, 2021 for upgrading technology infrastructure. In a communication with the taxpayers, the FBR said, “In order to provide seamless online taxation services, we are upgrading our technology infrastructure. All of our Inland Revenue Services including Iris, eFBR, Tax Asaan, Sales Tax, etc, will be temporarily unavailable from 00:00 till 04:00 hours every day till August 30, 2021.”

However, Customs-related WeBOC and OneCustoms services will be continuously available during this time, the FBR added. The FBR said it regrets any inconvenience caused in advance and looks forward to serving its customers with improved efficiency. Earlier last week, hackers attacked Pakistan’s largest data centre run by the FBR and managed to break the hyper-V software by Microsoft, bringing down all the official websites operated by the tax machinery.

“There has been a national crisis like situation since 2:00am Saturday morning and we may not be out of the woods by Sunday evening,” a senior official said while explaining the gravity of the situation.

“The FBR’s website is temporarily down for scheduled maintenance,” read the website when it was opened. However, the authority issued a general press release regarding in-progress service optimisation activities at the FBR House Data Centre.