The website for the Alabama Department of Revenue is down this afternoon, for those people looking to access the site.

The website located at http://www.ador.state.al.us is timing out when users try to access it.

There are several possible causes for this. Since it is the middle of the month, the downtime may be from a large amount of website traffic. The other cause could be simply a server overload for other reason such as Denial of Service attack (known as a DDOS attack). We have not been able to get any official word on what is causing the downtime as of yet.

The Alabama Department of Revenue has recently sent out letters to many Alabama residence requesting taxes be paid for online internet purchases from websites such as Amazon.com, and eBay.com. It is estimated that most states are losing tax revenues in the amounts of millions of dollars due to online purchases which taxes are not paid on. This could be a reason for an extremely large amount of traffic to the website, which in turn is causing the website to go down.

So far, about 30% of people who have received notices from the Alabama Dept. of Revenue have sent in checks for their backed taxes from fiscal years 2006, 2007, and 2008. Others still have yet to do so. The sales tax in the state of Alabama is currently 4%, and the state government expects its residence to make tax payments for purchases made online.

Has anyone been able to access the website today?