Beginning on Tuesday evening, June 15, 2010, many Intuit websites and services became unavailable due to a power outage at their data center. Even though you may be using the Desktop version of QuickBooks, this could have had a major impact on your ability to conduct business. Charlie Russell, from the Practical QuickBooks blog wrote a very interesting piece yesterday that he is continuing to update, if you would like more information.
Even though I use the desktop version, when I went to do payroll VERY early yesterday, before I knew about all of this, I did a payroll update and tried to process payroll but no taxes were withheld. Once I realized what was going on with Intuit servers I knew what the problem was – I couldn’t connect to the servers, therefore I couldn’t obtain updates or validate my subscription and therefore QuickBooks thought I no longer had a payroll subscription.
Not a biggie for me as payday is Friday and I was just trying to get one step ahead…..others were not so lucky. There are a lot of really angry people on the Intuit Community forums
Everything is fine today, just had to go online and validate my payroll subscription before doing payroll this morning.
All in all, not a very good past couple of days for Intuit or the people who rely on web-based offerings by Intuit such as credit card processing, payroll or those who use the QuickBooks online edition to run their business.
A very pertinent question for ALL of us – do we each have a backup plan if we face a power outage or some other event that is beyond our control?