Evidently, there was a massive outage at an Intuit Data Center and many Intuit websites and applications are down.  The official word is “Intuit continues  working to restore full service to a number of websites and applications, including QuickBase, that became unavailable at about 7pm Tuesday, Pacific time.  Our first priority is to give customers full and complete access to our services and their data as soon as possible.  We are also investigating the cause of the problem and will take measures to prevent a recurrence.  We appreciate our customers’ patience.”

So, here’s some alternatives in the meantime:

1. Emailing
   • Use Outlook — in QuickBooks, go to Edit>Preferences>Send Forms>My Preferences to change it to use Outlook.
   • In the Invoice (or Estimate or form), go to File>Save as PDF or you can download CutePDF Free (www.cutepdf.com) and print to PDF.  Then, use another email service (like Gmail) to send an email and attach the PDF to it.
2. Payroll — Use a free Paycheck calculator http://www.paycheckmanager.com/free_payroll_calculator.aspx or the Circular E (www.irs.gov) to calculate paychecks manually.  You may need to issue manual checks instead of direct deposit.  Then, you can enter it in QuickBooks later.  If you use Assisted Payroll, call them to see how they want you to handle it.
3. Credit Cards— Write down the customer information and process the payment later.  Be sure to maintain the sensitive credit card info securely until it can be destroyed later.
   • Call to get an approval code
     • Vista & MasterCard 800-228-1122
     • AMEX 800-528-2121
     • Discover 800-347-1111
4. QuickBooks Online — You may need to write down orders/invoices or manually write checks and enter the details later.

Keep in mind that any of us could be without power due to a severe thunderstorm, flood, tornado, fire, earthquake, hurricane, snow storm or a number of other problems.  It happens and as business owners we have to deal with things calmly and professionally.  Usually your customers, vendors and employees wiill understand the situation.  As small business owners, we need to have a backup plan of how to continue operating when an emergency strikes–whether it is a natural disaster or a failure in technology.  You may want to make sure you have ‘business interruption insurance’ that would cover losses in certain circumstances.

Rest assured that Intuit is doing everything possible to fix it and ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Update at 9:45 CT Wed 6/16 from Intuit here–several websites are back up now: http://bit.ly/bMlTZb