Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology spent $96.5 million on a failed website redesign. Prior to investigation, the department had claimed this figure was $4.1 million. It was found that $78 million was paid to a private consultancy.
The new website was so problematic that users were unable to access critical weather data.
&quot;Users found it difficult to navigate, and also criticised the changes to the radar map, which made place names hard to read. Farmers were scathing, as they were unable to locate rainfall data.
The new platform did not allow people to enter GPS coordinates for their specific property locations, restricting searches to towns or postcodes.
Families and farmers could not access vital, localised data such as river heights and rainfall information and this missing data created panic and fear across communities.&quot;
The federal government was forced to intervene, ordering the public department to fix the website. It was reverted to the original website in 9 days. Just like that, Australians lost 96 million in taxpayer dollars.
<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology-new-website-cost-blowout-to-96-million/106042202" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Read more</a>

rryyqn

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology spent $96.5 million on a website redesign that failed so badly it had to be reverted after 9 days. Users couldn't access critical weather data, farmers lost access to rainfall information and GPS coordinate searches, and the radar maps became unreadable. The government initially claimed the project cost $4.1 million, but investigation revealed $78 million went to a private consultancy. The federal government intervened and forced a rollback to the original site.

How to burn $96.5 million on a failed website redesign

Sounds more like a scam. :) Not adding gps location is like entry level programming, amazing there is nothing to stop it before it goes this wrong or is that cap at 100M$ 🙃

I used to do such revamps much better for EUR 3000 or less.

How is this even possible?!
Were they paying $500k per button?

This was so damn expensive 😂😂

$96.5M lost because real user needs were ignored. Technology must serve people — not the other way around.