Quicken online goes offline for several hours
The online version of Intuit's Quickbooks, the small business accounting service, went offline for several hours yesterday.
A related outage apparently also took down Intuit's credit-card processing service, Innovative Merchant Solutions, which the standalone version of Quickbooks uses as well.
Turbotax Online was also down yesterday evening, but it's unclear it was scheduled maintenance or part of the problem.
Affected customers of Quickbooks Online were left without access to their financial records, reports CNET's Rafe Needleman. Users of the desktop software version of Quickbooks could access their records, but those relying on Intuit for credit-card processing had to do authorizations manually, over the phone -- a slower, more expensive process.
All online services have outages from time to time -- but this one appears to have been lengthy and unsatisfactorally managed. Needleman reports that CNET received complaints from users that communications from Intuit gave neither a reason for the outages nor an estimate on when the service would return.
Intuit spokespeople are still not commenting on what caused the outage, but Needleman says the company said the following this morning:
QuickBooks services, including IMS and QuickBooks Online, are fully running and have been since late yesterday afternoon. Yesterday, some customers may have experienced intermittent delays in accessing these services because of network issues over a course of about six hours.With service restored, we have extended our QuickBooks Online service hours so that we can respond individually to any issues they may have related to this outage. We notified customers to contact us so we can be of further assistance. Customers choose Intuit to provide the high-quality service they've come to expect from us. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate their patience. We know that they need and expect our services to be available when they want them and working to prevent this from happening again.