Following the alleged hacking of the website four times on Tuesday by what the Australian Bureau of Statistics says were foreign hackers, many Bega Valley residents have been skeptical of the move.

Bega’s Mary Scollen even predicted the “network will crash” on social media on Tuesday afternoon.

“The 2016 online Census form was subject to four Denial of Service (DoS) attacks yesterday of varying nature and severity,” the head ABS statistician David Kalisch said in a statement on Wednesday morning.

Mr Kalisch said the first three breaches caused minor disruptions, with more than two million forms successfully submitted and safely stored.

“After the fourth attack, just after 7.30pm, the ABS took the precaution of closing down the system to ensure the integrity of the data,” he said.

“Steps have been taken during the night to remedy these issues, and I can reassure Australians that their data are secure at the ABS.”

Online users were met with error messages and told the system was "overloaded" before the website shut down.

A DoS attack can be caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, where hackers attempt to crash a system by flooding it with bots, or Trojan, accounts, overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.

One Twitter user, Melbourne-based information security and cybersecurity professional Mathew Hackling, posted information showing global digital attack maps with no DDoS activity in Australia on Tuesday.

Mr Hackling runs his own security consultancy called Ronin Security, currently working with World Vision and is a member of the Australian Information Security Association.

Some readers are also skeptical of Mr Kalish’s statement on Tuesday morning. 

“After the government says the website totally could handle anything and not crash, I don't believe a word they say,” Nola Bufton said. 

“Nothing is safe in cyber land.”

While Senators such Nick Xenophon, Scott Ludlam and Sarah Hanson-Young said they would be withholding their names from the census form due to privacy concerns, not everyone feels the concerns are justified.

Merimbula’s Steve Humphries said he does not “understand the hysteria” surrounding the boycotts and Shylea Ulrick said the federal “government already has everyone's information so i don’t see what the concern is”.

Many Bega Valley residents avoided using the internet at all and filled out the traditional paper census form.

“[I] didn't even bother trying, just filled forms out by hand,” Bega’s Karen Lemon said.

“I filled mine in and posted it last week,” Mandi Rush said.

Others had no problem completing their census online.

“[I] did it online, no problems, easy and fast,” Richard Merrell said.

“No probs, completed mine in afternoon, took less than 15 mins,” Bega’s Jan Southcott said.

The ABS has attempted to ease public concerns over fines for not completing the form on census night.

“ABS would remind Australians that they have plenty of time to complete the Census, to well into September, and again note that fines will not be imposed for completing the Census after Census night,” Mr Kalisch said.

An expected update from Mr Kalisch on the website’s status at 9am on Wednesday was yet to be released at the time of publishing.