ACT Government Scrambles to Fix Duplicate Images Riddling Its Digital Services This Week

A system-wide problem with duplicate and broken images across ACT Government digital platforms came to a head this week, forcing the Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate to pull several webpage sections offline for emergency remediation. The fault, traced to a content management system migration that began in late June, affected at least a dozen public-facing portals, including the Access Canberra service hub and the ACT Planning portal used daily by builders and residents lodging development applications.

The timing is particularly awkward. The ACT government has spent the better part of two years pushing residents toward fully digital service delivery, arguing it reduces wait times at shopfronts like the Service Centre on Dickson's Woolley Street. A visible failure of the very infrastructure meant to replace in-person queuing undercuts that case in a direct and embarrassing way.

What Actually Broke — and Where Canberrans Noticed First

The most visible symptoms emerged on Tuesday, July 1, when users trying to navigate the ACT Planning portal reported that map tiles and development application imagery were either duplicating across the screen or displaying as broken links entirely. The Gungahlin Community Council posted on its members' forum that several residents in the Jacka and Moncrieff estates had been unable to view boundary diagrams attached to neighbourhood development notices — a legally required step in the objection process.

By Wednesday morning, the problems had spread to the Suburban Land Agency's listings pages for land releases in Whitlam and Macnamara, where block imagery was repeating incorrectly, making it impossible to distinguish between different release sections. The agency confirmed the issue via its website status page but did not give a timeline for resolution at that point.

The root cause, according to documentation published Thursday on the ACT Government's ICT status dashboard, was an automated image-deduplication script introduced during a server migration to the new whole-of-government cloud hosting environment. The script misidentified unique images as duplicates and either suppressed or looped them — the worst possible outcome for image-heavy planning and land portals where visual accuracy is not optional.

Public Servants and Residents Left Waiting

The disruption landed at a difficult moment for Canberra's development sector. Land releases in the Molonglo Valley corridor are drawing strong interest from buyers priced out of established suburbs like Curtin and Hughes, where median house prices remain well above $900,000. Inability to view accurate site imagery, even for 48 to 72 hours, can delay purchasing decisions and formal objection submissions during tight statutory windows.

ANU's 3A Institute, which studies technology governance and has collaborated previously with the ACT Government on digital-service design principles, has in separate published work flagged that image and media asset management is consistently underestimated in government platform migrations. That broader pattern appears to have played out here in concrete form.

The University of Canberra's local government research unit has previously documented that ACT residents' satisfaction with digital services dropped when outages coincided with high-demand periods — an observation that seems directly relevant given the current land release cycle in Whitlam, where a new tranche of blocks was listed for ballot this month.

The Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate said via its status page on Friday that a manual image audit was underway and that the affected portals should be restored to full functionality by close of business July 7. Access Canberra's shopfront at Dickson remains open for residents who cannot complete transactions online in the interim, as does the phone service line.

For anyone lodging a development application or planning objection through the ACT Planning portal before July 7, the directorate's advice is to retain copies of any supporting imagery locally and to document submission attempts with screenshots in case statutory deadlines need to be verified later. The Gungahlin Community Council has advised members to contact the planning directorate directly by phone if boundary imagery remains unavailable and a formal objection window is closing within the next week.