Friday, March 25 and everything seems to be down again this morning. Here’s the QuickBooks Online Blog with service status updates and subscribe to get email notifications.
Unbelievable — yesterday several Intuit services (QuickBooks Online, Intuit Merchant Services and Intuit Payroll) were down for a few hours and unavailable. QuickBooks Online is down again this morning (and possibly other services). Like many others, I am frustrated and disappointed with Intuit. I want to know why they still do not seem to have effective, redundant backup systems in place to kick in when there is an outage. Intuit was named #4 on Fortune’s Most Admired Companies for Computer Software and I usually admire and respect them as well. However, continued outages and down time hurts their reputation and the confidence of accounting professionals and small business owners.
For alternatives to help small businesses operate during the outage, this post includes several options along with numbers to call for voice authorization for credit cards and more.
For updates follow Intuit on Facebook, Twitter or the Intuit Community Forum.
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Update at 5:00 pm Central: from Rich Walker and Kim Amsbaugh at Intuit:
QuickBooks Merchant Services, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Payroll and other services are intermittently available, as we bring back services on a server cluster-by-cluster basis. Unfortunately, the entire restoration process could take several hours .
As a result, customers may be able to access these applications, although service could possibly be interrupted during the restoration process.
Rich: “We’ve got a boat-load of engineers working on restoring service. Personally, I’m sick to my stomach about the problems this is causing you, and I’m really, really sorry, but I know that won’t fix the issue for you or your clients. I will provide another update by 4 p.m. Pacific time.”
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Update: Intuit’s Response is here.
Sadly, I can confirm that Quickbooks Online continues to have outage issues in Nov. of 2013. I have been without my company’s information for 5 days now. QB Online support is not helpful and does not return calls as promised. It is impossible to reach anyone who knows what is really going on. I have had to do payroll and pay bills by hand and my customer files are unreachable and I cannot process credit cards. This is costing me real dollars in many ways. Once I get my data back I am seeking other options.
Merlin — I’m sorry to hear you’re having problems with QuickBooks Online. However, I’ve been able to login this week without any issues and I don’t see anyone else complaining about an outage or problems (other than issues with payroll last week). So, it doesn’t sound like an issue with QuickBooks Online. What is happening? What browser are you using (use Chrome and clear your cache & cookies)? Have you tried logging in from another computer or device?
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I have a new client that hasn’t been able to set me up as a user because QBOE keeps going down. I only use QBOE for billing and tracking A/R and I access my clients’ files. Perhaps my clients should all convert their files to a desktop version and access their data remotely with LogMeIn, Remote Desktop or some other remote accessing app.
This is confirmation enough for me why I don’t use/rely on online services. In the short term cloud computing may cost less and I think there is good reason for that.
Here’s the official response from Intuit: http://bit.ly/fzAGpe
Hi –
I too have just started my own practice. How do I explain this to my newest client using online payroll and merchant services – both “mission critical” to this client. They recently implemented QB Enterprise after using a “real accounting” application (to use my client’s vernacular) for 20 years with no such outages. I certainly cannot tell them to expect these kinds of outages during tax season due to the increased demand on the Intuit Servers…..
A company the size of Intuit without redundant Servers is inexcusable, ESPECIALLY WITH THE AN INSTALL BASE THIS SIZE.
SHOW SOME RESPONSIBILITY!!! Users pay for these services and expect them to be available barring unforeseen circumstances. Increased demand on your Servers is most certainly not unforeseen circumstances.
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Are you serious here – Scheduling maintenance mid day of a week day?
Amature hour if that is the case. I have worked in small offices and large offices and never would they do anything that could potentially comprimise the integrity of the system during business hours unless the integrity of the system had either already been comprimised or was under attack from hackers/virus. Well INTUIT, which one was it?
Personally, I don’t know how this continues to happen. How can a company of this size not have redundancy? One server outage should not take the whole system down. Obviously, there is a systemic issue within the Intuit IT infrastructure that this continues. If Intuit continues to place short term profits (and share price) ahead of long term infrastructure changes, their marketplace share will erode and their name will be mud in the industry (which they are well on their way.)
Sorry, I usually don’t rant in public about this, but come on Intuit, wake up!
I realize your frustrations and understand how difficult it is to be at a client’s office without access to files. I have chosen to use Right Networks as an alterrnative to QuickBooks Online. They are never down and are quick to respond to any questions you may have, even if it is because your internet connection is the issue. Check them out http://www.rightnetworks.com.
No, I’m not a salesperson for them but a user of their services. There is a cost involved but worth it when you are trying to do your job.
I, too, have encountered my Intuit frustrations. I am in tax season crunch and when I need to dial support there is an hour wait. Does Intuit not realize that this happens every years at this time? Why do they not gear up to help us out better during crush time. HR Block hires thousands of people to prepare tax returns just so they can meet the demand. Intuit is happy to take our fees, but does not provide adequate support.
I’m just getting started with my own accounting practice, and I am frustrated to say the least with all the problems that Intuit has been having. I have been a long time follower of QuickBooks up until now, but I am beginning to explore other options as a better alternative for my existing (and any new) customers. I believe that both Peachtree and Accountants World offer better (more stable!) options. Thanks for making the decision to switch my customers easy for me, Intuit!
We’ve restored service for QuickBooks Merchant Services, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Payroll and other online offerings. As our systems come online, customers may experience a slight delay when logging in. If you cannot log in, please wait a few minutes and try again. We appreciate your patience and again apologize for this disruption.
QuickBooks Merchant Services, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Payroll and other services are intermittently available, as we bring back services on a server cluster-by-cluster basis. Unfortunately, the entire restoration process could take several hours .
As a result, customers may be able to access these applications, although service could possibly be interrupted during the restoration process.
We’ve got a boat-load of engineers working on restoring service. Personally, I’m sick to my stomach about the problems this is causing you, and I’m really, really sorry, but I know that won’t fix the issue for you or your clients. I will provide another update by 4 p.m. Pacific time.
Engineers are bringing QuickBooks Online clusters back online. Customers are being notified via email when each cluster becomes available.
Thanks for the updates Rich. We know Intuit is working hard to restore services.
when you call customer service, all they say is “our engineers are working on it” and “it is a connection issue.” They do not seem to care how many businesses are affected by their incompetence. Last summer, yesterday, today, no one cares at Intuit or they would have fixed the problem. It is costing real money.
Yep, here I am at a client’s office in beatiful sunny West Seattle telling them how wonderful QuickBooks Online will be for them and then when we go to sign in, we get the dreaded yellow screen of death “QuickBooks Online is Unadvailable”.
Maybe Intuit should change the name to QuickBooks Offline.
Intuit Merchant Services is now up and running. We continue restoring QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Payroll. This may take several hours to make sure the system works properly. Our first priority is restoring service, and we will work with customers to resolve further concerns when service is restored.
Updated: March 22, 12:45 p.m. Pacific time [sorry, I was 15 minutes later than I said in my last post.]
We know that our small business customers and accounting professionals can’t access QuickBooks Online, Intuit Merchant Services and QuickBooks Online Payroll. I know this is more than frustrating for you and your clients. The root cause of the outage was a problem during a scheduled maintenance. We can confirm that there is no data loss. We will provide an update at 12:30pm PT here and at community.intuit.com.
I will bet a lot of money that there are Japan companies with in-full redundancy capabilities and have been fully restored. QB experienced this last Summer and offered little more than apologies. There is no excuse to be less than operational within an hour of a major outage for a comapny of this size.
There is no telling what caused this problem but those of us who experienced Katrina have to wonder if trhis is some kind of fall out from the disaster in Japan.
Hopefully this gets back up soon. We have hundreds of users on our QBSDK plaform (Transaction Pro Importer for QBOE) blaming us because our tool isn’t working.
I’m glad to hear that you “power players” are frustrated. I have just a few clients that use any online service and I was glad that I did not get any frustrated calls/emails. I think if we all “stamp our feet” Intuit may hear. My concern is that PeachTree will use this as a marketing tactic if they have stable servers.
Michelle, after all that we went through with this last summer, I thought that they would have taken care of this kind of thing. We were told at the Sleeter Conference (in the Intuit Accountant Town Hall session) that they took the lessons they learned to heart and that they were not going to let it happen again, but then here we are. Frustrating!
Yes — VERY frustrating! 🙁