Quickbooks Online – developed and marketed by Intuit – was inaccessible on Monday and early Tuesday morning.
For some reason, the downtime wasn’t widely reported, despite the fact that accountants all over the country were probably tearing their thinning hair out as they tried to process payroll without Quickbooks.
(Yes, users of QuickBooks Merchant Service could still process by voice authorization, but still, how friggin’ lame is that?!)
All of this makes us wonder, if a tree falls in a forest does it make the sound of CPA’s crying when they can’t get access to QB Online?
A fair question indeed, but one that is unlikely to be answered anytime soon. Remember, accountants are a notoriously stuffy lot – even on what passes for a good day in dull bean counter land.
Obviously, this Quickbooks debacle hasn’t exactly improved their already difficult disposition. But I digress.
Fortunately, Intuit did issue an official statement about the annoying downtime, which the corporation neatly attributed to unspecified maintenance work. No, I don’t think they meant the broom and mop kind, but then again, you never know. Maybe IT guys are doubling as janitors and vice versa during these difficult times.
“As part of our efforts to improve service and increase uptime, we did maintenance work over the weekend which caused issues with several of our systems on Monday, November 14,” the company wrote in a boilerplate explanation.
“We are experiencing the same issues today and in order to fix it have decided to take QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Payroll, QuickBooks Connected Services, QuickBooks payments processing, GoPayment and all other payment processing services offline until at least 12:00 p.m. PST. No data has been lost.”
Although no data was lost (woot!), Quickbooks Online going offline (if only for a day or so) obviously had major consequences for employers attempting to pay their impatient workers with American dollars, which seem to be losing value every minute of every day. Pretty soon Monopoly money will be worth more, but we can probably substitute Canadian currency (otherwise known as dried maple leaves) and hope no one notices.
Oops, there I go, digressing yet again.
On a more serious note, Quickbooks Online now has the rather dubious honor of joining other financial sites like Bank Of America in the Downtime Hall of Shame.
Yes, BoA’s website went down at the beginning of October, just as some angry customers were preparing to transfer their money to credit unions following a ridiculous increase in fees.
Coincidence? Ha! Well, not according to the bank, which claimed the website falling offline was absolutely unrelated to the unpopular fees and was not the result of a hacking attack.
What can we learn from all the downtime, you ask? Just this: financial sites going down are a real drag and can affect the everyday lives of ordinary people like you, me and the person sitting next to you in that ugly cubicle. So please, BoA and Quickbooks, keep your sites online. Do it for the 99%.
