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A letter from the CEO
[Note: As of October 13, the QuickBooks blog has moved to http://quickbooks.intuit.com/blog. Follow us there!]
I deeply apologize for the pain we have caused those of you affected by this week's outage. We hold ourselves to the highest standards in dependability and customer service, and over the past two days, we have failed to live up to those expectations.
My leaders and I have spoken to a number of you and there is simply no excuse for having such a negative impact on you.
It is our priority to work with those of you who are affected and, where we can, make things right. We have all-hands on deck to help you resolve the issues caused by this outage.
I want to share with you what we know at this time about what happened. The disruption occurred during a routine maintenance procedure. An accidental but severe power failure during that procedure affected our primary and backup systems, taking a number of Intuit's websites and services offline.
We worked to restore our sites and services as quickly as possible while bringing services back in the safest, most reliable way. We understand your frustration and are sorry it took so long. We understand the important role our services play in your business and life. And we take that responsibility very seriously.
I also want to share that we have no evidence of a security breach or attack on our servers. And at this time, we do not believe there was any damage or loss to customer data.
At this stage, we have teams monitoring the performance of applications and further investigating the cause of the problem so that we can learn from this outage and prevent it from happening again.
I want to thank you for your business and your patience. We will work our hardest to earn back your trust.
Thank you,
President & CEO
Intuit, Inc.Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized
316 Comments on "A letter from the CEO"
June 17, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Will we be issued a credit for down time?
June 17, 2010 at 7:01 pm
Besides a simple apology letter, I would like to see some type of reimbursement to every QB online account that was affected. If my organization is late on a payment, then we end up paying. This should be no different. Although my org did not lose any money during this event, we did encounter downtime. We are trying to finish our FY-end reports and this system breakdown was a pain in the rear. Accidents happen, but there needs to be a show of good faith by QB.
June 17, 2010 at 7:22 pm
I agree, thanks for the apology but who pays for the employees that could not do the job? Estimates, invoices, payroll??? I do not use all the services, because I am asked to upgrade (pay more) everytime I need something extra! I am currently looking for different software.
What is QB really doing to Fix the problem we are now dealing with???
June 18, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Can you let me know if you can find a comparable but more reliable software partner?
June 17, 2010 at 7:55 pm
Hi, agreed on this level. You can contact our support to help you process the refund. (Would recommend going in-product and clicking on help during business hours to contact them – this is the fastest method)
June 18, 2010 at 7:03 am
Not to be too hard headed, but they should contact me. Even more, they should automatically reimburse accounts that were affected.
June 18, 2010 at 8:06 am
I agree, it should be an automatic reimbursement process, instead of wasting our times trying one sided conversations to no avail.
June 18, 2010 at 10:08 am
i agree as well.
June 18, 2010 at 1:30 pm
If QB was down for a couple of hours, this apology letter might suffice. But in this case, they are going to lose customers due to lost of trust. An automatic credit would help alleviate this tension.
June 19, 2010 at 7:23 am
Come on guys – it took Obama 2 months to figure out that oil was leaking, but you're beating these guys up for a few hours? Cut them a break?
June 20, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Yeah, that's constructive. Bring your politics into this discussion. Or don't, because nobody cares.
June 21, 2010 at 9:35 am
Obama Who?
QB raised my service cost 500%
sounds like another Obama
more cost no service
June 22, 2010 at 7:31 am
For my business, it was two days of lost productivity and a two day delay in billing my customers.. Which leads to slower turn around in accounts receivable. This was no small impact to my business and to the fact that I still have to make payroll for employees who sat on-site with nothing to do. It this had been a two hour outage, I would not be beating them up. Huge difference between two days and two hours.
June 22, 2010 at 4:24 pm
The outage was a huge inconvience…..BUT mistakes/mishaps happen. We are all business owners and probably can relate to the position that intuit is in.
June 17, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Thanks Brad – those in IT understand… hopefully though these are few and far between – we've been using your service for over 6 years… first we've seen this.
June 18, 2010 at 8:55 am
The service recently went out as few as 3 months ago. If this is acceptable to your business, i guess it's good. but for a company that uses it all day long, it's a true inconvenience.
June 18, 2010 at 12:43 pm
This isn't the 1st for us. In February, we not only experienced QB's server being down, but it was 4 days before we were partially up and running. We worked with various techs at QB's for weeks before they could give us access to 2 of our companies. One company wasn't given back to us until May, 2010. We never received a credit……just empty promises and apologies. When working those 2 weeks in February, I was shuffeled around from one person to the next, with no satisfaction in sight!
June 17, 2010 at 8:12 pm
The reason I am on Quickbooks Online user is I have had a sever crash myself from the office. I thought that by going online with a reputable company that they would have redundancies in place, but after hearing about how this happen, I'm not at all pleased with the lack of knowledge in the IT Department. This is the second time in the last few months that this has happened, and things need to be changed so that the back-up servers are in different cities, let alone under the same power grid. I would only hope that the CEO can give us a plan of action so that this does not happen again. I don't think it is even reasonable to compensate us for this because intuit couldn't afford the bill, I only ask that you beef up your IT department and get the back-up severs out of the same building and in two different cities. I enjoy using Quickbooks but intuit customers can't keep referring new people to you if you don't keep up with the demand and speed of the system because it has gotten slower- a lot slower.
June 19, 2010 at 7:32 am
I agree Skipper. In fact I agreed to purchase QBO based upon a false assumption that they had servers in multiple locations to prevent what just happened. My error in assuming! Maybe, this is a wake-up call for Intuit to do just that.
I too am noticing a slow down in services. I thought it was my computer/internet access so I purchased more memory and went to cable internet access (from 1.5mb/s to 10mb/s.) Both of those actions didn't help any.
I also mentioned it several times to QBO reps when discussing other matters.
June 23, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Steve, did you ever consider running a speed test on your internet connection, or maybe just visiting a second website? There's no reason to pay for a higher internet speed based on a hunch that you've done absolutly no research for.
June 19, 2010 at 2:40 pm
I am also remiss in that I just assumed that the backup servers would be in another geographic location, as this is standard industry practice. Now I will have to check to see if Intuit keeps these servers right on top of the San Andres fault line!
Come one guys, I can understand accidents happening, but reputable, responsible IT organizations (which I am paying you to be), plan for these and put ADEQUATE measures in place.
p.s. I am not looking for a refund, take that money and invest in a back up center in Fargo, ND, Oklahoma City or some other geographically dispersed location.
June 21, 2010 at 6:20 am
Funny they say a power outage took them down. What ever happened to battery/generator power backup. I run a small ISP, and we have had power outages that lasted 1/2 the day several times a year, but our batteries/generator kept all our servers and modems running the whole time. Anyone remember the rollilng outages years back?
But then again, I'm just a small buiness. Maybe they couldn't afford the power backup system to keep their servers running during this process or during a power outage.
I don't know about any of you, but if they don't have power backup, they are playing with fire. This sounds like they are trying to cover somethign else up.
June 21, 2010 at 9:40 am
How stupid..
Same power source to server and backup server incase there is a power outage.
June 22, 2010 at 4:51 pm
I totally agree with the backup system in a different city, I assumed it was because it was really what should have been done. I also have noticed the speed of the system has gotten really, really slow. Please Quickbooks solve these problems then report back to us.
June 18, 2010 at 4:49 am
I also agree, the appolgy letter is nice but I have people who have been unable to process invoices and payments. They should offer at least a month free as a sign of goodwill! An electronic letter does not pay the bills.
June 18, 2010 at 10:25 am
This outage came on the heels of a notice that they were forcing me to move to an "upgraded" product (online payroll) at three times the price I'm paying.
So on the one hand, they are forcing an increase down my throat. And then on the other, the have an outage that requires me to manually process payroll.
So I have NO sympathy. Don't charge me more for an inferior and untrustworthy product.
June 21, 2010 at 9:47 am
Your lucky, my cost went up 500%
June 22, 2010 at 1:01 pm
QB online is a joke. This outage is just the tip of the iceberg. If you have more then 10 employees your payroll takes forever, but they want to increase the price. Absolutely ridiculous. The limitations on the reports you can run is embarrassing. This product is terrible and I will never recommend it again. I am in the process of finding a new product to use now. My business can no longer use QB online its just not reliable or efficient. Terrible, terrible product. All QB online support says is, submit feedback and we will look at your comments. What a joke.
June 18, 2010 at 5:35 pm
I agree 100%!
June 18, 2010 at 4:58 am
Reimbursement?! Business is an imperfect operation. To expect QB to be 100% perfect is illogical. They deliver a useful, quality service and stepped up when it broke. It's just a cost of doing business (and a pretty small one at that!). Get back to work!
June 18, 2010 at 6:15 am
I agree with Charles. It is ridiculous to expect complete perfection. People are way too demanding and unrealistic these days! Thank you for the usually great QB service! Stuff happens!
June 18, 2010 at 9:09 am
I agree Charles! No company or human for that matter is absolutely perfect 100% of the time. To expect Quickbooks to reimburse everyone affected would put them out of business and then what would we do??? I love this system and things like this happen. I understand that it is very tough on the businesses affected, but there is no way to prevent all things bad from ever happening! I am just pleased that all info was still there and I did not lose anything! Thanks Quickbooks!
June 18, 2010 at 2:53 pm
I totally agree with Charles and Lisa. It was horrible and a very big inconvenience. I do know that when it comes to business, technology, etc..issues just like this do and will continue to happen. When it comes to technology you can almost never be perfect. As much as I would like a reimbursement or a free month it is not at all logical for a business to do. If you do it for one you have to do it for all. That is where the issue is. It would be impossible for the business to afford. The business would not even succeed after such.
I and many other companies are just so delighted to use a program like this. If it is something that is so drastically needed for our business; then; we just have to move on. There is not other programs like this online and if there were; mishaps like this would happen just like this at some time or another as well.
We could have lost much more during this process and, we did not. Thank you Quick books.
June 19, 2010 at 7:58 am
Nobody is saying their perfect! Cause nobody is, and mistakes happen everyday. So what if something happened where you couldn't pay your bill. Do you think QB would be understanding enough to wait for their payment. I don't think so! Their running a business and should be prepared for any situations at all times.
June 19, 2010 at 8:41 am
You people are either naive or are shills of Intuit planted in here to soften these streams of complaints.
If you know anything about IT infrastructures, redundant systems can be set up to prevent extended outages like this one.
A large company like Intuit has the deep pockets to make this happen. They shouldn't be in the business if they weren't.
Like I said, someone should be fired for lack of foresight and planning and the aggrieved (us, the customers) should be made whole.
June 22, 2010 at 6:38 pm
I totally agree with "you people are either naive or are shills of Intuit planted in here to soften these streams of complaints".
Anybody that would say that Intuit needs a break, "get back to work" is a QB Chump, and shouldn't be telling anyone what to do. You're an Intuit Shill whether you were planted here or not. If you're happy with a data center that handles some of the most vital assets a
business possesses, and they do it like amateurs, you deserve QuickBooks Online crappy software. These people aren't newbies testing the waters in their courageous and bold new business initiative, learning as they go. Intuit makes HUGE $ but doesn't reinvest that $ to make a better company, unless it means more $. Clearly, profit is the main motivator, at a company that issues a new version of their software more often than any other software product there is, in an industry that has barely changed in 20 years. Throw in a couple new features that nobody cares about, or should be there anyway, and get everyone to pay all over again. Intuit is about as irresponsible as Transocean/BP in their lack of concern and precaution taken with the responsibility they have been given. Worse really, since any data professional, and EVERY SINGLE serious technical data center has redundancies built in that would have barely shown a blip on your tea-cozy selling ebay QB company file. They knew damn well that this could happen, and they didn't care. They decided to just wing it and hope for the best because doing it the right way would cost money that wouldn't immediately translate into more profit. And if they don't want to build redundancy into their data centers, why doesn't their software have a built in local failover backup that would allow you to continue working offline? The system could keep a datafile and a working copy of QB on some local drive, uptodate, for just this kind of emergency – Some people's Internet connections actually go OUT now and then. Maybe there are some safeguards, I don't use the online product, but that wasn't the only product affected. It seems they keep ALL their servers in that datacenter, so websites, program updates, even (I think) their call center systems, all in one basket. Our accounting dept couldn't process payroll throughout the entire outage either and they have the program installed on their systems.
If you want to cut Intuit a break, you're just telling them that you're willing to accept mediocrity. Typical of a mega-corporation, they care more about themselves and their bottom line than they care about their customers. If you don't mind that, you are really their ideal customer. Everyone else should be demanding more, or saying goodbye.
June 21, 2010 at 7:31 am
Sounds great, I'm a contract cleaner and if my employee fails to clean a business on a given night I'm going to call my customer the next day and appologize, then tell them 'stuff happens' and charge them anyway. I'm sure they'd be fine with that.
The very least they can do is not charge for the 3 days of down time. My sales tax was due today, thankfully it was back up and running but it's a major inconvenience and I can't imagine what kind penalties that I would have to pay if my sales tax wasn't in on time!
June 18, 2010 at 7:08 am
I agree Charles. It's like this oil spill…..the CEO's didn't wake up the morning of the blast and spill and say "hey, let's blow up the Horizon Oil rig and cause a spill and see how many of us can die and how much we can destroy the gulf coast and everyone's way of life! The CEO of QB didn't wake this week and say, hey, let's cause a major power failure and disrupt our clients for the day and see how much havoc we can wreak! People, please, accidents happen! However! I will say that I would expect much to be learned from this and preventive measures put in place to be able to handle it if it should happen again. I've been using QB online for 7 years now and QB products prior to that and have been satisfied even though the day loss of work was a bit difficult—-I survived it!
June 21, 2010 at 9:51 am
maybe they did not cause it, but I bet we have to pay for it.
just like our Obama
June 18, 2010 at 8:39 am
I completely agree… greedy bastards… c'me on! Best thing you can find on the mkt, for a pretty reasonable price.
June 18, 2010 at 10:30 am
Charles has a true business leader's attitude. Remind yourself how good Quickbooks is, the product, the support, and how they attacked solving this event, let alone what they are probably doing in the background as we speak. Get back to work!
June 18, 2010 at 11:38 am
🙂 I agree, get back to work. If, you got so backlogged, how do you have time to comment here?
June 18, 2010 at 12:26 pm
I agree with Charles. How many of us have been given grace at one time or another by our customers. I know I have. So extend that in return. What goes around comes around. I've been very happy with Quickbooks for the last 6 years. Thank you for being the best!
June 18, 2010 at 1:20 pm
If I make a mistake and it causes my clients to suffer a loss, then I do whatever I have to do to make my client whole and thus retain their business.
I agree that no entity can be 100% perfect, but if a situation arises that causes those who are dependent upon it a hardship, a concession or conciliatory gesture should be offered.
June 18, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Keith is right. Of course, no business is without flaws, but to simply accept this and say "get back to work" is rediculous. If my business has a problem, the customers are ALWAYS compensated. QBO agrees to offer a specific service…..they failed to provide.
As a new customer in 2010, and outages two times in three months, we are also looking for an alternative software. Unfortunatly, switching over mid year is too costly and time consuming. I guess we're stuck with this unreliable product for a few more months. A great disappointment.
June 18, 2010 at 8:35 am
I assure you QB is working on an insurance claim and they won't lose a dime. Not offering a sign of a goodwell momentary reimbursement is just another disappointing action from upper management. Very disappointing QB.
June 18, 2010 at 9:35 am
This is a great product that has rarely gone down. I don't think it wasn't something every business couldn't deal with. You have to be ready. The internet connections go down all the time. I appreciate the apologies, but it was just one day. It is not something that has a history.
June 21, 2010 at 7:59 am
Why are all these people saying "just one day"? My access was down longer than that. My customers didn't care about my problem with QB. I was expected to provide services promised regardless. Why should we as customers expect any less from QB?
June 18, 2010 at 10:12 am
Its bad enough that when we call tech support we get offered allot of other features we donot need or already have. but when these crashes happen, there is no one to speak to. When we request an e-mail notice of when the service gets back online we never get a response. The last time this happened it was on a Friday and we almost did'nt run payroll. It was a very stressfull situation we where placed in.
June 18, 2010 at 10:37 am
It seems that these outages with QB Online Edition are becoming a more and more regular occurrence. Like many of your other customers who have posted – besides your "apology", I too would like some type of reimbursement. I think a FREE Month would be sufficient given that all of your customers were not able to access their accounting needs for over a day. Throughout the day – I needed to search for items and were not able to because your site was down.
It seems that CEO's and companies now a days think a simple "apology" is sufficient. It is not. I and your other customers WILL EXPECT TO BE REIMBURSE FINANCIALLY!! Perhaps this will motivate you to make sure this does not happen again.
I would suggest that you and all of your employees read the book by Carl Sewell – "Customers for Life" – It's the best book written about customer service. He was mentored by Stanley Marcus and knows that for every bad impression you leave with a customer – they are going to tell at least 10 other people of your bad service.
June 18, 2010 at 10:49 am
Instead of so many or you requesting a refund or reimbursement, why don't you request that Intuit spend the money to setup the proper redundant systems they should have had in place to start with. That is a solution that will be more valuable than one month free service etc.
June 18, 2010 at 11:15 am
i agree, six spence non the richer and 1 month reimburse doesnt solve anything
im more worried on what can happen next, i don't care about the small monthly fee we pay for all the benefits we receive (except backups,serivce continuity,etc)
June 19, 2010 at 8:05 am
If they was going to spend the money on fixing the service it wouldn't have went out again.
June 18, 2010 at 11:32 am
need a credit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! we are severly behind now!!!!!
June 18, 2010 at 11:34 am
really? less than $50 solves your problem?
June 18, 2010 at 11:40 am
that's funny David :)!
June 18, 2010 at 7:57 pm
$50 may not solve the problem, but it is the least qbo could do.
June 19, 2010 at 8:25 am
I dont believe the $50 is a factor in the matter. It's the principle of the matter. A huge amount of large companies use QB. Just imagine not being able to get your hard earned money on payday. You waited two weeks to get your pay, and your bill collectors are calling you.(Frustration) Your boss have to deal with telling all the employees no check. How many complaints, yells, and screams they have to deal with?(Frustration) Now QB has caused a lot of aggrevation, and frustration that they should deal with. Thats the worse part about running a business, the customers. If you don't have customers how can you run a business? So you must please them in order to be successful.
June 20, 2010 at 1:36 pm
I'm surprised by Tiffini's and other's comments that QB is used by large businesses. I always thought the program was advertised as "a small business solution." Any large business I have ever been with used specially designed accounting systems with dedicated IT teams to service them. It seems chancy to fully depend on a system that caters to small business if your business is large and complex. Perhaps we all (not just Intuit) should be thinking about how we can overcome power losses, downed systems, etc. I think IT people call it disaster planning.
June 18, 2010 at 12:35 pm
No worries! We understand that errors do take place and we MUST understand. We are very happy with the product and that is all that matters! Thank you!!!
June 19, 2010 at 6:53 am
fire the CIO. New blood required. I am a new user, not even up yet. QB on line will be history if I go down once.
June 19, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Well, it is Saturday night and they are off line AGAIN!!!!! Run, get out while you still can. Don't waste countless hours doing imput, only to be unable to use it! Wish someone would've warned me!!GRRRR!!
June 19, 2010 at 9:31 pm
As an IT executive myself having been responsible for a Saas product I'm keenly aware of the tradeoffs. I believe that Intuit made a conscious decision not to invest in geographically dispersed hot backups because of the costs involved. I couldn't believe it when I went to get online a few minutes ago to discover another outage. I just assumed that the SLA would include an automatic credit for the outage – silly me. The online product is a good product that has made a lot of progress and its ubiquitous capability is hugely valuable to my company but frankly – Intuit needs to get a new CIO.
June 20, 2010 at 1:41 pm
I was not affected by the downtime. However, I feel that this is a good time to vent my anger with your company. I have had several companies and have used versions of Quickbooks in all of them as well as Quicken for my personal use. I have praised your product when ever possible. I will continue to use your porduct. My anger has to do with your quote/unquote change in the online payroll program. When I purchased the program last year I was told that the price I was paying would never change. It looks like you found a way to get around that with this supposedly new program. I guess that I shouldn't be upset that it is a 600% increase in cost to me for a program that isn't much different than the one I have been using. Good job of penetration pricing for your new product.
June 22, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I agree with you, Dan … but I'm confused. Is it up? Have we been switched over?? I figured we'd see some some bells and whistles or something when it was new!
June 23, 2010 at 2:50 pm
I was most annoyed by the lack of communication. The message about the outage should have been updated more frequently. Posting a telephone number which just repeated the same information was really annoying. I didn't bother to sign up for the email alert to let me know when things were working again as the last time I did that I received the email two weeks after the site came back on line.
June 17, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Who do we need to talk with to resolve lost sales and financial implications? What's the best, most orderly way for us to have our issues resolved?
June 17, 2010 at 2:53 pm
It is impossible to NEVER have a problem. I appreciate the diligence on getting everything back on line. Customer's who expect absolute perfection are not being honest and their own company and services are not 100%, 100% of the time. Your transparency and communication was excellent and we look forward to using your product in the future.
June 17, 2010 at 6:36 pm
While perfection is a near impossibility, accountability is reality. I am not asking anyone for reimbursements for the lost time due to the fact I chose to use this service. Things happen, however if I hear the word TRANSPARENCY one more time I just might snap. Quit with the politically correctness crap and go back to work. If this downtime didn't really affect you much, maybe you need to work on your marketing a little more so your business can grow to the point where you actually rely on accounting software. Until then, for the rest of us that are not independepently wealthy, grow up!!!
June 18, 2010 at 10:39 am
Yeah – and I suspect you work for Intuit as well.
June 17, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Thank you for the open and honest explanation of the outage. While it came right in the middle of our normal billing cycle, we were able to reschedule our tasks on this end and appreciate the fast response. Dealing with computers and servers all day, every day, I can appreciate the effort it took to bring such a large operation back on-line.
We look forward to continuing our working relationship with Intuit. The recent customer service I have received as well as this open explanation of the outage helps me know I am working with a company I can trust with our company's financial data.
Best regards,
June 17, 2010 at 2:52 pm
I would have expected for the redunancy to be in place for this not to happen. I also want to be compensated for the downtime as well.
June 17, 2010 at 7:46 pm
I agree about the redundancy. There should have been backup servers at a different location so a power outage at one location would not effect the servers (with the same data) at another location.
June 18, 2010 at 5:50 am
This is exactly the point that needs to be made. Primary and redundant systems should not be on the same power grid. What about generators for backup? I was tolded when I signed up for QBO that there were redundant data servers in seperate geographical locations. I see now that was not true. Even simple backup services have redundant offsite locations for backup. It is a simple rule for data backup that you have an offsite backup in addition to your primary onsite backup. If Intuit is not going to provide redundant offsite backups of our data then they should provide us a way to make our own "usable" data backups ourselves. The keyword here is "usable." I expect Intuit to address this problem or I will be forced to change my service.
June 18, 2010 at 8:38 am
You are correct, this is what they need to do to correct the problem. Our Microsoft RMS POS system has a limited copy of the current data base at each register, so if we would lose the server the POS register can still do LIMITED operations and then up-load them to the server when the server connection is returned. We could not operate without this, no POS system can.
Problems are the way of life, we need back up ability and a way to use it at our own computer…
June 19, 2010 at 8:31 am
Good idea!
June 18, 2010 at 7:52 am
This outage cost our small business financially, but most of all in lost productivity and frustration.
I purchased and continue to use the on-line version specifically to ensure safe data back-up, the portability, and for the reliability. We are all deeply affected when an outage occurs. Though rare (by whose standard?) I remember 3 specific instances in the last 12 months where QB Online was down for most or all of the workday.
We simply cannot have this level of reliability.
Bill Mixon, R.Ph.
June 17, 2010 at 2:53 pm
I think you need to be able to work offline I think you can look at google gmail program and see what they have done. Or you need second system running somewhere else so when this happens all you have to do is flip a switch. This cost me thousands of dollars. I thought this would never happened for such long period of time with QB. I am shocked and will be prepared to look at different program because this cant happen to me where I am dependent on one company for my business.
June 21, 2010 at 8:53 am
Ben – we along with you lost thousands upon thousands of dollars as well. Not including lost employee time.
June 17, 2010 at 2:55 pm
You want a credit for 2 days of down time?! Wow that is crazy!! And you want to resolve lost sales and financial implications, then do not have your information online! Keep it on your own computers at your office. You act like this happens all the time people, get off it!
June 17, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Hey DB
Last time I checked I wasn't in the finance industry. I know if I botch my clients jobs, I'm responsible to make it right, regardless of the cost. I'm not asking for a million bucks here, but in this world, money = accountability. It's that simple. I'm a small business, and a 24hr outage cost me money.
Of course, maybe your company can afford to pass the buck.. Mine can't.
June 18, 2010 at 7:37 am
I realize that QB is not perfect and have never expected it to be so but to be offline for over 18 hours is unacceptable. To have your redundancies under the same grid is not acceptable according to everyone in IT.
I don't expect to recoup the $$$ lost during the downtime but a simple acknowledgement that QB did cost my company money is not asking for too much. QB acted like I was out of line when I tried to find out what was going on and if there was a timeline for return of service.
Accountability is everything and, as I see it, I am accountable to QB for paying my bill to them and they are accountable to me so that I can get paid by my customers who require me to invoice them prior to the deliviery of their product which is usually with 4-8 hours of receiving the order.
June 18, 2010 at 9:35 am
My business isn't in the finance industry either, as you put it. Our company can not afford to pass the buck either, but there is such a thing called comunication with your customers. If you have that type of repore with your customers most of them will understand. We are also a very small business. Things happen when you are working with computers and the Internet. Like I stated before, keep your info on your own computers if it is that important to your day to day operations, not online where there are more chances of issues happening that could affect your day to day buisness.
June 19, 2010 at 8:41 am
@ D.B that could be a option, but if you pay QB and this is what they say they offer for that amount then they should stand by what they say. In any buisness! You could have a repore with customers you have been working with for a while, but suppose this is a new customer your just getting for the first time. How do you think that looks on your business? I would say they are very unprofessional. Now I as a customer don't know about the system you use and that it's down. It's just plan oh making you/your business look bad.
June 17, 2010 at 2:56 pm
We all need to be credited for the disturbance. If our payment is short u would be calling.
June 17, 2010 at 2:59 pm
I'd like to know which transactions that were scheduled to be processed on the 16th (CST) were not completed. Since what time should I check…6/15? And what time? Until which day and what time?
Please inform us as soon as you can.
June 17, 2010 at 2:59 pm
I was happy with the open communication on the problem. I do think the length of the outage was a BIG DEAL. I would like to see how inuit plans reduce the down time if this was to happen again, I can understand a 4 – 8 hour outage, but for me it was several days.
June 17, 2010 at 3:05 pm
I had just signed up for the merchant service account, and had run a mailer campaign for our big sale with the VISA, MasterCard, and Amex Logo's and was unable to accept the cards during your outage.
I would like to know if there is going to be any compensation for this outage, as I did spend a signfigant amount of money advertising this event with the CC logos. Most embarassing.
Thank you,
David Enns
June 18, 2010 at 7:29 am
I find it most interesting that QBO responds to the "softball" questions and comments, but seems to be completely ignoring the questions around accountability.
You people that are making excuses for this are quite irritating. Do your clients/customers not hold you accountable if your business does not perform as you said? I know mine sure do! If there is no compensation then there is no accountability, as we all know the bottom line is the all mighty dollar!
Please stop and think before you defend QBO for this problem. This outage cost my small business real money, not just soft-costs, but real actual dollars and embarrassment. They (QBO) need to understand that this is unacceptable, and the only way to understand that is to have them be compensate those of us affected, and force them to defend this to their own share/stake holders.
June 17, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Did this occur at the Quincy site?
June 17, 2010 at 3:10 pm
So where were the glorious "redundant servers" you always advertise during this event in San Diego? I guess there aren't any redundant servers for live servers and you need to be transparent about that.
Just because you may have backups in more than one place does not give us faith that we can continue using your services unless you have a complete fall back server to keep everyone live.
June 17, 2010 at 3:14 pm
The concern I have is regarding the data(backup)within our quickbooks program. Is there a way that we could manually backup on a hard drive of our own. Being without our accounting data would be devestating to our small businesses. I have Impact Dealer Services, Inc., Impact Dealer Solutions, LLC; and Rapid Response Solutions, LLC; and I personally am the Treasurer of Desert Sky Baptist Church. I would really appreciate your attention because I am sure I am not the only one who thinks as I do. This just might be another selling point for you with small businesses. Thank you for your consideration.
June 17, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Hi Catherine — you can export a full copy of your data to a QuickBooks-formatted file on your hard drive, and you can save as much data as you like to Excel in the form of reports. You'll find links to instructions for both on this page: http://quickbooksonline.intuit.com/support/answers.cfm?faq_id=1062
June 18, 2010 at 1:09 pm
OBO Dave: Please explain how to "save as much data as you like to Excel in the form of reports." Small reports, sure, but if I attempt to run a complete YTD general ledger in QBO, I receive a red message at the bottom that the report is too long. I'm a self-employed bookkeeper and I encounter this at both clients who use QBO. I don't have this concern with the desktop version (or the desktop version of Peachtree).
June 17, 2010 at 3:17 pm
my babies need to eat, dis not cool mr. smit
June 17, 2010 at 3:18 pm
How can your back-up system be running on the same power supply as the primary system? I'm very surprised the entire system is not mirrored in a different facility in a different geographic location. Seems like pretty elementary back-up concepts are not being used. Very surprising.
June 17, 2010 at 6:34 pm
June 17, 2010 at 3:18 pm
It's sad to know that such a large company does not have data center failover in place. What would you do in case of a natural disaster at your data center?
Is there no disaster recovery testing taking place with Intuit? This is something we certainly expect from a paid for "professional" service. We're not talking about free Gmail accounts here. We're talking about a professional financial institution.
June 17, 2010 at 3:20 pm
I work in the IT industry and own an IT consulting company. With that said, there is NO excuse for this type of downtime. EVER. Unless a natural disaster took out multiple redundant data centers.
Where is the redundancy accross multiple data centers? How can a quick power failure knock your PRIMARY -AND- BACKUP systems offline? How is that called "REDUNDANT" when a single power failure impacts all systems? You need to have BACKUP AND REDUNDANT power to a BACKUP SYSTEM. Have multiple data centers so that if one data center is affected, the other one isnt. Have multiple databases syncronize and replicate to redundant servers where you can fail-over in the event of a failure.
SORRY, I am not buying the "Power Failure" excuse. I am advising all clients through email to NOT USE QUICKBOOKS ONLINE OR OTHER INTUIT HOSTED SERVICES as Intuit's IT infrastructure has proven to be a complete and utter FAILURE.
June 17, 2010 at 7:07 pm
June 17, 2010 at 9:29 pm
Actually, Kris' comments strike at the heart of the matter. Either Intuit lied about their redundancy or they completely misunderstand what redundancy is. Neither answer is good for anyone using their products.
June 18, 2010 at 11:56 am
I agree with Kris, we are not getting the whole story.
Kris, can you post a copy of that letter so other IT Consultants can send it out.
June 17, 2010 at 3:23 pm
You were supposed to send an email out when this was resolved. That did not happen in my case. So, aside from the goofiness of this goof-up, you didn't handle the follow up well at all. Like many, I'm very disappointed and will be looking at other options for the future. An apology doesn't cut it, action does.
June 17, 2010 at 7:57 pm
This is true Bruce. We posted a blog about this issue – our typical notification email alerts work great when everyone is up at the same time. The team wanted to get users back up as soon as possible, which meant some were back before others. Because of this, we had a significant delay in sending the notifications. This is a team learning and something we will address with the right actions. Again, apologies for the outage and the delay is telling you when we were up.
June 20, 2010 at 11:18 am
I have never worked for a company whose system didn't go down company wide occasionally. I don't care how good your IT department is, things happen. I agree that to expect QB to be perfect is insane. Another note: QB is not intended for big companies. It is meant for smaller, owner-operated companies. I have been using QB in a variety of versions since it was the original DOS product, and I can't say enough good.
June 17, 2010 at 3:36 pm
I concur with previous comments in being surprised to find out that it appears Intuit doesn't have redundancy in a different geographic location??? Isn't that Business Resumption 101? How could a power outage in one location take out your primary AND your backup?? THAT'S what you need to fix, so this never happens again. Outages are normal. But 3 days? Really?
June 17, 2010 at 3:37 pm
I'm sorry but this Power Failure thing sounds very fishy to me. I would think that you would be running on regulated power with backups on every critical piece of equipment. I have a $300 or so battery back up on all of my computers, modems, phones, and routers, and I'm only responsible for me. If I had thousands of businesses relying on me to protect their data, I'd have much more than that. This has been disapointing and yes, I expect to be compensated for much more than 2 days of interruption of service, (This is not cable TV, but our lives). After this event, I would like to be able to download all of my information on a daily basis if desired, and I don't want to have to pay for that program so that I can access my information, and change it, if this type of thing happens again. What's scary to me is to think that none of us are safe, and this could have wiped out years of my information and I would have no way of getting anything back. Lots of deep thought is needed on how to best look out for ourselves because nobody cares about our businesses as much as we do.
June 17, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I agree, I have worked on many computer rooms and they always have a UPS system in place for such issues. I don't think were getting the whole truth.
June 17, 2010 at 3:42 pm
I love the idea of being able to work offline that might be worth the recent price increases and the various incentive percentage reductions that you implimented earlier this year.
June 17, 2010 at 3:52 pm
I use QuickBooks Online because of the portability. I am a bit surprised as to the notification process. Better yet, a lack of a notification process. I was expecting an email when the system was available, but was never notified. As a small business owner, I depend my financials for obvious reasons.
I own an IT consulting company and can not phathom this type of down time. My responsibility to my customers is that they do not have downtime and, if they do, it is very minimal (1 – 2 hours tops). I am sure your IT staff is wondering what happen?
I would prefer that customers be notified sooner and kept updated via email on a frequent base.
With such a large customer base as I assume Intuit has, I am surprise of the lack of redundancy.
June 17, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Hi Will — we've definitely realized that we haven't lived up to your expectations here. We are taking these lessons to heart and will be working hard in the coming days and weeks to regain your trust.
June 17, 2010 at 3:55 pm
There needs to be an automatic backup to the customers computer, or computers at the users discretion. Currently the only way to get backup data (without sending it to excel) is to make the request and then Intuit will send it in the form of an email attachment.
At the very least, Intuit should credit one months usage to its customers.
June 17, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Hey Jim – the hint of good news here is that no data was lost. Your data is and has been safe. The process and downtime is not OK, but do want to clarify that the back up of your data was down and is restored completely.
June 17, 2010 at 3:57 pm
finally got baby mommas paid with the payroll program. now them babies can eat. still dit be the suck.
June 17, 2010 at 4:10 pm
I'm glad that you have come around and been honest with your customers. For the bulk of the day yesterday it was "we are having an issue, be back in a while." I too am surprised that there is not a data center failover plan. Like others, I need a way to ensure that I have periodic extracts of my data that would allow me to stay in business in the unlikely event of a catastrophic event such as an earthquake or natural disaster. I've used Intuit products for 10 years and see no reason to change vendors. I would however appreciate a touch more communication and a committment to working the kinks out of Quickbooks online to bring it up to part with the desktop edition.
June 17, 2010 at 4:27 pm
SUGGESTION: Rather than any form of compensation, what we'd really like to know is that some serious money gets put into prevention.
You are no ordinary SaaS vendor because of the number of customers you support for mission-critical apps. Your responsibility is commensurate with your number of users.
It is absolutely inconceivable to me that the people who manage your data center had a single point of failure that should take 24+ hours to recover — one would have expected not just failover on equipment but to another data center.
This is a failure of monumental implications — so a "Letter from the CEO" that you just spent a few million for a backup data center in a different location with auto-failover would put a lot of minds to rest.
Otherwise, what prevents this from happening again through some other unknown problem.
At EDS or one of the bank/insurance data center companies everyone responsible for this would have been walked to the door by security guards by now.
For those of us who know something about data center operations in large companies, the explanation that a power outage during routine maintenance caused a 24-hour outage clearly is not the whole story. The whole story, if reported, would indicate that your infrastructure is not nearly as reliable and well-managed as you would want us to believe.
I would much rather pay more for the product for the assurance that everything was fault tolerant, even the physical location. The future of SaaS requires a lot more precautions than you apparently have in place.
Please get it fixed ASAP.
June 17, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Hi Peter — thanks for the thoughtful comment. We clearly have a lot of work to do in the coming days and weeks. We're committed to doing what it takes to ensure our service is as reliable as you've come to expect.
June 17, 2010 at 4:30 pm
This is probably the final nail in the coffin for our use of QBX online. A lack of back-up redundancy, a lack of Mac OS support & quite frankly a little too little & little too late to web served CR applications. Glad our business is growing regardless so we can even start to phase out your pricey merchant services accounts as well. We thought we had a good product but have been sorely disappointed with your online/web served products. Best of luck Intuit. Cheers
June 17, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Can you export the QBO data to a regular QB backup? Before I used the online version, I used the desktop (QB Pro) and kept my backups at elephantdrive (now at compliantdata). If I could keep a backup copy there and then use the desktop version during an outage I would be fine.
June 17, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Hi Vince — we have a couple of different options for exporting your data depending on what format you want it in. You can see details by following the links on this page: http://quickbooksonline.intuit.com/support/answers.cfm?faq_id=1062
June 17, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Guys (and girls), I think there's a more fundamental issue here and all the anger, hostility and refund ranting won't solve it. In my opinion, this issue is a cry for help. Call it business suicide. Almost successful too.
There are a lot of us in the industry who's core focus it is to provide the "five 9's" (99.999% uptime) to our clients. Those same people can, probably very easily, make recommendations to Intuit on how to do that same.
Intuit's core focus is software. It has always been software. It's good software. THAT is the business Intuit should be in. NOT data center management.
There are really 2 courses of action that Intuit can take.
1. Intuit will try to keep the fallout from this outage internal, deal with it internally and "try" to regain the confidence of all of us. I think that would be a sad direction to take. No one will be appeased with the "we're dealing with the problem" or "we're working to make sure this doesn't happen again."
2. The better part of valor would be to reach out to some key players in the industry, establish transparency with the user base that shows Intuit's attempts to make good by bringing in independent consultants. There's a lot of smart people that also rely on Intuit's products to run our businesses. It would be a shame to not utilize the "power of many" to make sure this never happens again.
June 17, 2010 at 8:00 pm
Intuit's core focus is probably making money, like most businesses. It tries to do this by providing great software. However, it is in the data center managemnent business with a product like QBs Online. They are responsible for protecting our data and keeping it available to us 24/7. Intuit failed by not having redundant backup systems at an unaffected location.
June 17, 2010 at 4:52 pm
I am surprised that everything was in one data-center. We are all lucky it was not destroyed.
It seems to me that Intuit is dependent on proprietary software to power their servers and it is very difficult and expensive to offer truly redundant service with that (2 or more geographically separate locations).
Look at Google and their Google-apps setup using open source software and truly redundant service. They offer redundancy, reliability and speed. At a lower cost i bet too. And it works on any operating system or browser.
June 17, 2010 at 4:53 pm
I see many users before me have already questioned about the backup system, so I am not going to add on that.
Delay on billing is for sure a problem. Also, we had customers ringing to inquire about their account status, billing questions, and balances for payments. Yet, we cannot answer or take any of them, since there is no way we can give out the accruate information. Now all accountants need to do overtime get all works catch up and return all inquiries received.
June 17, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Hey, how many Intuit employees does it take to change a light bulb?
"We are woking on a punchline and will have it available as soon as possible."
June 17, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Too funny!
June 17, 2010 at 8:02 pm
The power has to be on so they can see the light bulb.
June 17, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Please reply.
Will you soon have a mirror offsite complete backup system?
Yes or no?
June 17, 2010 at 6:04 pm
I'm Stunned.
Even the web hosting company we use for very small websites has redundant mirrored servers in multiple facilities in different parts of the country.
Are you telling us that there was a power failure in more than one area?
One of your CSR's told me it was a "lightning strike".
The whole thing sounds like you guys need an actual IT department.
An outage I understand.
Lag time while switching to backups, OK.
48 hours offline? Silly, juvenile and unprofessional.
For me I think it's time for a serious review of the level of trust I have placed in your company and consideration of some of your competitors.
June 17, 2010 at 6:40 pm
My biggest concern is that (since we started with Quickbooks On-Line) 1/1/10, this is the 3rd outage. This is averaging a major outage every two months. I understand issues pop-up —- but this won't work for us.
June 17, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Interesting? I've been using QBOL for years and has never experienced an un-scheduled outage.
June 18, 2010 at 1:18 pm
I've been using QBO for five years, although not every day, at every client. This is the second instance in approximately three months. I believe Intuit's explanation the last time was that it did not affect every user. This instance appears to have affected every user.
June 17, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Lucky for me I run a rather simple one man band type of company (for now). I normally only use my QB online a few hours a week, and could have easily been completely unaware that the outage had even happened.
In my case, my data is all there and we are back up, so life is good. The fact that there seems to be no fail over facility available definitely doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling. Here, I feel the need to add to the chorus who are making what appears to be very reasonable demands:
1. We need a redundant facility that would allow a failover to another facility. period!
2. Please provide an automated way to obtain a qbf formatted backup of our data that we can download daily.
Here in South Florida, there were areas without power or Internet access four weeks after hurricane Wilma. Had your data center been in such an area you would have an angry mob at your door with pitch forks and shovels! Were I live we are keenly aware of the need for this kind of redundancy. This is one of the reasons I chose QB online in the first place. Unfortunately, I now fear that my choice is misguided.
The ability to have a daily updated would mean that we could still operate even if there were an extended loss of service. For customers that have access to Quickbooks pro, this would even be helpful if they themselves were without internet, and running on generator.
One other idea I would like to add. If you could make available as stand alone Quickbooks that would work only for a period of say, 30 days,and could be downloaded free, this would ensure that we can operate under loss of service conditions.
One final note: I also use QB online because my primary operating system is Linux. I have to fool your server into thinking I have Firefox on Windows XP to even log in, but at least it works. Because this is one of very few options I have to do my work from Linux, I am not going too switch anytime soon. Please make the above mentioned changes, and be very open about it, and many of us will have our confidence in you restored. We need to be keenly aware as users, that these changes are taking place.
Doing this will make us all better off.
P.S. If you could make it so that I can print invoices from Linux too, I will absolutely thrilled. Happier than a pig in s#%^ even. OK, I have to go do my billing…
June 17, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Dear Brad:
Thanks for letting know about the problem, keep up the great work. I love your program.
Thank-you……………AAA Handymann……….Don…..Have A Blessed Day..
June 17, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Although unlikely, those things can happened in very rare occasion. Any user of QB online should be aware of it. As long as the data are safe, everything should be fine.
No need to issue credits. Just make sure to fix the problem and try hard to prevent this issue to happen again.
June 17, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Im a small fish that relies on QBO for invoicing customers. One recent expereince: I was at customer site, they wanted an updated statement of past transactions and the amt due. Along with a current invoice. I couldnt do any of that. I spent 20 minutes of unpaid time apologiziung and attempting to explain. I left with my tail between my legs and tried to call the 866 number from the car. I was met with a recording that bascially said – were down and were not answering the phone. ( which raises the question – how did anyone reach the CEO ? Carrier pidgeon ? ) I was instructed to go online and request an alert when the site comes back up … Thats an example of how NOT to do customer service. So Assuming QBO is as they say interested in making this right – how will they know who was affected since they werent taking any calls ?
AFAIK ( last time I checked ) the export features DONT work as expected. You wont get seamless export of QBO data to a Drive based QB.
I would like to know the DETAILS of what is being done to prevent this from happening again.
June 17, 2010 at 7:31 pm
I felt like leaving QBOL when this happened but then I thought about it. My data is constantly backed up, the service is reliable. I have been using QBOL for years and has never experienced an un-scheduled outage. Uptime over the years has been 100% for me, 7AM – 7PM EST. Downtime now due to this issue is around 99.9999%.
If I had QB on my own systems and my system would have crashed???? Oh my God.
Even with all that, and I am greatful for the backups and the service, I still believe QBOL should prorate the cost of the service but even if they don't, not gonna cry about it.
June 17, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Hey Mark – Thanks for sharing that insight.
June 19, 2010 at 9:15 am
Why didn't no one respond to Doug? Could you not feel his frustration and aggrevation?
June 17, 2010 at 8:03 pm
This is a management issue, not a technical issue:
1. Please only perform maintenance on Friday evenings so you have more time to recover from any problems.
2. Why are your primary and backup systems not geographically dispersed?
3. You are not a tech company and should get a new head of technology that has financial services CIO experience. I have read the bios of your current "leaders" and they seem over-educated and under-experienced. IVY league schools are where smart people go to tell each other how smart they are. Make a switch and save future headaches. Pay an experienced east-coaster to relocate.
4. There is really no acceptable excuse for downtime in this age of cloud computing, fault-tolerance, and inexpensive solutions.
5. Can you issue a set of instructions for your customers to adequately back-up their information so that if this happens again, it won't be lights out?
6. Put the money everyone is asking for as refunds and credits towards a new, more qualified tech leader in your firm. Don't mess around and try to be nice to people who should be shown the door. Get better people now.
June 17, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Thank you for the apology.
I experienced the outage but I completely understand how these things can happen.
Thank you so much for taking the time to directly apologize to those of us using your product.
That means a lot.
June 17, 2010 at 8:47 pm
On the advice of my accountant, I moved 6 companies from Peachtree to Quickbooks online in January.
Time to move back, and get a new accountant.
June 18, 2010 at 11:37 am
Maybe time to move back, but not time to get a new accountant. No one could foresee this.
June 17, 2010 at 9:00 pm
An apology letter is an easy thing to write. Ask BP or Toyota.
June 18, 2010 at 8:45 am
June 17, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Just a suggestion the next time you do maint. you should do it on Friday evening and over the weekend so if this does occur it will be min. disruption. I am not ready to throw the baby out with the bath water quite yet but I suggest you do your maint. on the weekend not in the middle of a work week.
June 17, 2010 at 9:10 pm
First I am notified a couple weeks ago that my monthly cost for online payroll will be over 3X what it is now for the "new and improved version" which appears to do no more than the current version, than this happens and I can't process my payroll on time. Time to look for a different payroll system!
June 17, 2010 at 9:11 pm
How about a reimbursement for days down? Your service is not cheap. We were unable to
enter transactions important to our company. Thank you!
June 17, 2010 at 9:13 pm
How about credit for days down? Your service is not cheap. We were not able to enter transactions important to our company. Thank you!
June 17, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Everyone is happy to be online, but as of now, remember, nothing has been done to prevent this from recurring. It took 18 hours to even figure out what was wrong as they were still, "investigating." Download and backup all of your data and hope and pray another "power outage" doesn't hit again.
Power Outage – does this mean that power to the data center failed or a main power component within the data center failed causing backup/primary power to be cutoff from any power, thereby rendering backup power useless? And if this is the case and there are multiple data centers (as claimed by Intuit), how did this affect them as well. We'll need more answers Intuit, or we will leave.
June 18, 2010 at 12:33 am
I agree there should be some sort of reimbursement. QB Online is utilized by numerous small business and when those businesses are forced to shutdown (especially staffing companies that can't pay employees) it affects our bottom line and loss of goodwill.
Without proper reimbursement it's very easy to argue that the consequential damages caused were foreseeable and this would go federal….
June 18, 2010 at 3:01 am
Hmmm! Apologies and vitriolic responses, seems like the norm these days. If Intuit is truly sorry for their error, the first words after apologizing should have been, every client regardless of the effect of loss of service will be compensated for our mistake (accidental or not).
Merely stating the problem was accidental indicates Intuit does not want to incur a financial loss for the problem and they are hoping that a seemingly heartfelt apology from all in command from the top down will smooth the waters. Anyone out there not have to own up to their customers/clients if the case of a negative event? I think everyone does if they want to keep the business.
My suggestion is to pay the piper, learn from your mistakes and spend the money to make sure this doesn't occur in the future. Fire the person responsible for the accident and put in place systems to prevent not only this from occurring again, but any type of system failure/security breach. If profit margins suffer due to poor foresight, that is Intuit's problem.
If the CEO is not strong enough to make the tough calls, then fire him as well and hire someone competent not someone who apologizes for something that should never have occurred.
I am not certain there is no data corruption either. I was refunding a customer after the outage and received an error message about Posted Data. I had to resubmit the refund but until I have time to research the transaction files, I won't know.
June 18, 2010 at 3:04 am
As a new purchaser of QB I have to say I am totally disgusted with your customer service. I was previously using MS Accounting and now want to convert my data to use QB. There is a conversion tool on your website but it doesn't work when I download it. After waiting for 50 minuntes for an online chat response I rang the support helpdesk and was told that your conversion tool doesn't work in UK. And to add insult to injury that tell me it is my fault for not checking that I was looking at the US site and not the UK site!
Why don't you make that clear on the web site? Why don't you sell your software cheaper in the UK if it lack the functionality of the US version?
Why don't you provide better customer service?
I am really disappointed. I have used QB in the past and it was quite good. Now I just feel let down by a company that used to do better and is now a shadow of its former self.
June 18, 2010 at 3:14 am
Outage happened atleast two times in the past few months, and Why did it take to restore the servers for more than a day ? Now, I have a strong reservation about the Intuit's reliability in maintaining our accounting data.I was so amused by their explanation.
June 18, 2010 at 3:38 am
[…] Intuit […]
June 18, 2010 at 3:41 am
I believe that a credit to our monthly fee should be issued. One month free would be nice, although not cover the inconvenience created. Thanks!
June 18, 2010 at 4:26 am
I agree that Intuit should issue a credit to every customer.
The very least should be one day. But many of us, including myself, were unable to use QuickBooks for very close to 48 hours.
However, even a two-day credit doesn't cover the cost Intuit's customers incurred trying to conduct business without check registers, accounts payable and receivable ledgers, credit card processing, and payroll.
So I agree with the recommendation that Intuit credit every customer one month of their service.
So far, all I've seen from Intuit is several instances of the following blog posting, which indicate that Intuit expects every customer to call and beg for a credit:
"Hey again Richard, we're back online now. As for the refund question, we're addressing this via the support line. 1-800-286-6800. Thanks much and again – sorry from the team here."
Here is what one Intuit customer posted just below this entry on the Intuit blog:
"I called the support line and they were happy to credit me the entire $2.25!!! When I asked about the overtime expenses I will be paying I was put on hold and finally gave up after a while.
An automatic credit for a few months servcie might have saved them from all of the negative word of mouth that will follow.
I'm adding this information to my personal blog. I suggest everyone affected by this outage do the same.
June 18, 2010 at 5:05 am
Nice letter, but don't you guys know what the technology has available to avoid this, starting for example with cloud hosting? Are the responsible for this still working at Intuit?
I lost money because of this! I couldn't bill some customers, make estimates and had to send home an employee because he couldn't do his job thanks to Quickooks online!. I'd love to open my credit card statement next month and find out that I wasn't charged, as a good faith sign from this huge company that for a service that failed for more than a day and made me lost more than the 20 bucks I pay.
June 18, 2010 at 6:00 am
June 18, 2010 at 6:11 am
I am requesting a no $$$ out of pocket for QB.
Extend the service for 6 months with no charge to the affected clients. This will serve 2 things,
1. You know the price of down time
2. You keep your clients.
I am both an online and an Enterprise user and both can not work without the online support. I will find a different vendor if needed just to make sure I do my share in not allowing intuit to think they can get away with just an apology over the net. Social media can work 2 ways for the good and for the bad. My advice to you MR CEO is do not wait for social media to destroy your biz like it did to Nike with their personalized items. It is very important to actively address this issue prior to the social media getting to a point of no return. Take action now and compensate in the long run the above will turn into a win win.
June 18, 2010 at 6:18 am
CEO's response seems reasonable. Every web system I use, from Google Apps to my web hosting firm, experiences problems like this. The measure is whether they respond promptly, diagnose, learn from the problem, and keep customers informed.
June 18, 2010 at 6:24 am
This was unfortunate. We run a small dental clinic and were unable to access patient financial info or process payments, invoices, etc.
I read just a few of the comments here and I'm concerned.
Our confidence level in QB is low.
June 18, 2010 at 6:28 am
I appreciate your letter of apology, but I truly was excpecting at least a month free of suscription. We rely too much on this system and are very dependable on QB.
My cable company had a outage couple months ago and they not only gave us some credit for our next bill but they also gave us some movies on demand for free (and the outage was only for about 1 hour NOT 2 day). This is customer service!!. Unfortunatly there is not much competition for QB online so company seems not to worry much about losing customers.
June 18, 2010 at 6:28 am
With regard to compensation for the outage, QB should take a look at Google Apps as a model. When they have an outage, and they've never had one for anywhere near as long as this one lasted, they add time onto their customers' contracts as a way of apologizing and compensating them for the disruption.
This lets customers know that Google Apps does not take outages for granted. QB's mea culpa essentially says that they do. And this is very troublesome going forward.
June 18, 2010 at 6:34 am
Many of the points made here regarding redundancy backup systems at unconnected locations make sense to me and need to get in place ASAP. I will accept this as a learning experience for Intuit, but should it happen again, I will feel differently.
My biggest complaint was that during this outage, there was no information available as to what could be expected in terms of getting the system back up. Even when I called support and spoke with a rep, I couldn't get any more information related to what the expected down time would be, and when it was expected to be back up. I found this very frustrating. When I asked to speak to somebody who could help answer this question, I was told nobody had that information. When asked to speak with a mananager/supervisor to get more information, I was told nobody was available. How did anybody reach Brad? I personally don't believe he spoke with anybody. Lines of communication were essentially shut down.
I am not an IT person. I am an accountant. After reading all the prior comments by IT professionals I am a little concerned that normal redundancy procedures do not seem to be in place to avoid this type of a problem from occuring. Now, I am scratching my head and wondering what else is not in place to safeguard my system and data??? Is this the tip of the iceberg???
June 18, 2010 at 7:02 am
The apology letter was nice and businesslike, right up until the end of the letter. Brad. Brad WHO?
June 18, 2010 at 8:52 am
June 19, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Yeah, I got that, too. But he is identified later. There's a difference between being "friendly" and being responsible. The lack of a last name points to not really understanding that.
June 18, 2010 at 7:24 am
Will there be any SLA credits for the QBO outage? A credit for the downtime would demonstrate a sincere desire to retain customers. I have used a great deal of hosted services and I cannot remember ever having an outage that lasted as long as this outage.
A real explanation of what actually happened would go a long way in restoring customer confidence. The explanations you have posted have been long-winded attempts to appear like you are explaining what happened without actually explaining what happened. The impression is that you are hiding something – most likely poor system design and a lack of operational planning and procedures. I'm left to wonder why I am paying you every month to provide a fragile, unreliable service.
June 19, 2010 at 2:41 pm
So … go elsewhere? "Fragile" may be too strong a word, here. Yes, there is work to be done. Let 'em figure out what will make their customers happy and do it. I doubt Intuit is in the business to fail.
June 19, 2010 at 3:15 pm
This is not on-the-job training. If you're a billion-dollar company and you launch a major on-line product, you should have all the pieces already in place to assure nothing like this outage would ever occur.
Defending Intuit's lack of planning and foresight is insulting and, quite frankly, dumb.
June 18, 2010 at 7:54 am
I have been with QB Online for two(2) years and this is the first downtime experienced. I use QB on line for two (2) companies and use it everyday all day. Two days down but a big hitch in my workflow. I understand thing happen but I am very concerned about the backup and redundent system not comming online overnight. I went online (and pay a lot more for it)for the remote access from different locations and for the security (both data and physical). I'm very pleased with the access and the data security (never been hacked) but I'm very concerned now about the physical security and the data redundency, so if there is a problem I should be back online with my data overnight. I need to know I won't go 48 hrs without again.
June 19, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Or else, what?
June 18, 2010 at 8:05 am
[…] […]
June 18, 2010 at 8:10 am
Wow. First I have to shell out $60 for a new version of Quicken just so I can download my transactions for another year. Then last month I'm treated to a 400% increase (from $10 to $40) for my on-line payroll (my little *ONE* man company).
Then everything blows up and I have to call you for $2 credit? You're kidding, right?
The last time I called you guys was to get a license verification code. That call took 30 minutes since every other word from the phone-drone was a sales pitch for more Intuit 'products'. I make a whole lot more than $4/hour.
You can keep the two bucks. They are the last 2 you'll ever see from me:
June 18, 2010 at 8:18 am
We are upgrading to the full version of quickbooks so we can get away from the online version.
June 18, 2010 at 8:33 am
Why are the black up servers and the main server both affected? When you run a company that has this much of an impact on thousands of companies you should have realized that moving one or more back up servers in a different city, state or probably even region would be best that way if in one area power goes out affecting service one of the back ups from another area can take over until the issue with the main server is resolved. I'm part of a company much smaller than Intuit and even we have our main server and our back up server in two seperate regions.
June 18, 2010 at 8:35 am
*back up
June 18, 2010 at 8:33 am
I am not going to ask for any refunds or discounts from QuickBooks.
Why? U ask..
Because I cannot stand the kind of customer that is always holding their hand out every minute of every day just waiting for u to screw up! and I do not want to be one of ""Those Customers""
Problems happen! Even to the big guys!
June 18, 2010 at 8:50 am
You were obviously not affected in such a way where it literally shut your business down for two days. People shouldn't jump at the chance to gain a quick buck, but Companies who are dealing with such pertinent and confidential information should have more precautionary measures in place. A lot of companies won't go the extra mile until they are forced to.
June 18, 2010 at 8:40 am
I want to know how they fixed this so that next time there is a power failure it won't bring down all their systems. The fact that they haven't addressed this makes me think that they haven't fixed that issue yet. Why in the world would you have a cloud system that has a backup system on the same power as your primary… or for that matter anywhere near your main system? What this should tell everyone is that if the building where the power went down was destroyed, by flood, tornado, etc.. then you can bet you will be down for weeks. Scary but obviously true. That is lack of experience in IT management or lack of commitment from executives to spend more resources to truly devise a redundant fail-over system and swifter disaster recovery plan. This should be #1 priority in a could system. I want to know when this is resolved and addressed. Also, why did the CEO sign his name as Brad… without his last name? Seems like he isn't completely owning this or he would write his full name on the letter.
June 18, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Here's the info from Intuit's website:
Executive Profiles
Brad Smith
Brad Smith
President and Chief Executive Officer
Brad Smith became Intuit's president and chief executive officer in January 2008, culminating a five-year rise through the company where he successfully led several of its major businesses. Intuit is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, financial institutions, consumers and accounting professionals, and is consistently ranked as one of the most-admired software companies and best places to work.
As the company marked its 25th anniversary in 2008, Smith celebrated the past while creating a strategic vision that recognizes important market shifts that will serve as growth catalysts for Intuit's future. Among the most significant trends is the accelerating shift to a "connected services" world, where people and businesses increasingly go online to manage their lives, and abandon the traditional paper-based, human-produced, brick-and-mortar bound services of the past. Intuit is uniquely positioned to take advantage of these trends and help drive the shift to a connected services economy.
In the midst of this change, Intuit's mission remains enduring: To be a premier innovative growth company that improves its customers' financial lives so profoundly that they can't imagine going back to the old way. The company's strategy builds on this sense of purpose and foundation of success, while capitalizing on the current market shifts to accelerate Intuit's business performance.
The three-point strategy focuses on:
* Driving growth in the core businesses where Intuit has high share versus look-alike competitors, but low penetration versus the overall market opportunity.
* Building adjacent businesses and entering new geographies, with a particular emphasis on emerging markets.
* Accelerating the transition to a greater mix of connected services, which now represents over half of the company's revenue.
Before being named CEO, Smith was senior vice president and general manager of Intuit's Small Business Division. Appointed to this position in May 2006, Smith was responsible for the company's small business division which included the portfolio of QuickBooks, Quicken and Payroll products, serving 7 million small businesses. Before moving to the small business division, he led the company's Consumer Tax Group in San Diego from March 2004 through May 2005. The group produces TurboTax, the nation's leading consumer tax preparation software.
Smith joined the company in February 2003 as the vice president and general manager of Intuit's Accountant Central and Developer Network in Plano, Texas. Previously, he was senior vice president of marketing and business development at ADP. Smith also held various sales, marketing and general management positions with Pepsi, Seven-Up and Advo, Inc.
Smith earned his master's degree in management from Aquinas College in Michigan and a bachelor's degree in business administration from Marshall University in West Virginia.
June 18, 2010 at 8:48 am
This was a big loss for us. While we do not process credit cards through the QuickBooks system, we do all our employee time tracking and invoicing. None of the employees could enter their time and we could not bill. We bill on the Day it went out. We sat on literally thousands upon thousands of dollars because of Intuit's mistake. This was an outrage and we do plan to discontinue services with them because of it.
June 19, 2010 at 2:31 pm
You GO girl! Vote with your checkbook!
June 18, 2010 at 8:53 am
We trust QB to be working each and every day. These outages have happened one too many times which is totally unacceptable. How can i talk with my clients about using QB, when i'm not happy with the services. Your customers are you spokespersons and we're partners. On yesterday i instructed my Accounting Manager, to begin exploring the possibilities of utilizing another system. I this continues, we will have no choice than to cancel our subscription of which we've had since the inception of our business (15+ years). We want a year's free service to remain a customer.
June 19, 2010 at 2:30 pm
If you could type or even if you reviewed your own postings, I might be led to believe you never make mistakes either. If you find a better system, will you please post it here?
June 18, 2010 at 8:55 am
No contingency plan? My clients could not access their bank register and therefore had to put their plans and employees on hold. BP pledged 20M and while I'm not comparing the scope of this disaster to that one, can you tell us, Brad, how will you compensate all of us who lost productivity for one day?
One more nail in the Intuit stake. Keep 'em coming – you are all on a roll. Overcharging, underdelivering, customer service overseas, inundating my quickbooks with non-stop advertisements for add-ons and pretending like you really care.
The Anti-Intuit Revolution has begun – we are working feverishly to bring you some worthy competition.
June 19, 2010 at 2:22 pm
You GO girl! Vote with your checkbook! Find something better. Or create it!
I'm hoping Intuit has learned some things from this and will work to make their product better. In the meantime, I'm sticking. This is a valuable service to me.
June 20, 2010 at 10:11 am
I am furious!!! I am trying to work with this expensive program for court accounting and Here I thought something was wrong with my computer!! no messages til today about the outage but still I am unable to access any of my accounts!!!! With paying for each individual account this is ridiculous. and today is Sunday and I am trying to make up the hours of trying to get to my accounts on the past few day!!!! Any help available????? I called the 1800 286 6800 and they are closed!!! seem like they are similar to the BP guy who went yachting while the Louisiana fishermen couldn't go out on their boat to make a living. I guess Intuit considers us the"small people" like BP said of their victims.
June 18, 2010 at 9:41 am
I am a licensed CPA and I started my accounting practice 8 years ago. Through my professinal career, I've had many experiences with general ledgers and, by far, Quick Books has been the best I've found for a small business.
I've always recomended Quick Books on line but now I have my doubts. It was very annoying not having access to Quick Books and get things done timely. How can you assure me data integrity? How can you convince me data is secure? This is a high concern for me. My clients use the payroll on line feature. It scares me to think that sensitive data such as employee names, SSN's and addresses might be at risk. Please convince me that I should continue using Quick Books my self and that I shold continue recomending on line Quick Books to my Clients.
A very concernced CPA
June 19, 2010 at 2:18 pm
"Annoying"? Try Microsoft!
June 18, 2010 at 9:51 am
I accept the apology letter but I will like to have some sort of credit on my account since we were unable to perform on 07/16/10 due to this matter. We as a custer had pay our dues on time and we deserve some sort of compensation for the loss we had on Wednesday.
June 18, 2010 at 9:53 am
While I wrote to the people directly too, one of my comments was: Why maintenance on a weekday in any case. It is the worst possible time for my clients and me. If absolutely necessary, one would think,knowing the impact of power outages, doesnt intuit have generators running or battery back up or what ever it takes from a redundency standpoint to keep things functional at their servers that serve all of us? These questions address prudent behavior and dependability.
June 18, 2010 at 9:54 am
Never had a problem thanks for quick fix, no worries enjoy life and family c ya
June 19, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Now THERE's a good attitude! Thanks!
June 18, 2010 at 10:01 am
Brad thank you for admitting fault, I wish more business people (and politicians) stood up to mistakes. It was an inconvenience. I suggest you provide on-line users with a process for local back-up / operations. Thank you for your apology. The proof will be in the pudding, that's 1.
June 18, 2010 at 10:06 am
I've been using QB online for years and this was the longest outage I ever had. Fortunately, it wasn't busy week for me but if it was either first or last week of the month, I don't even want to imagine that would happen. Because accouting functions have lots of time sensitiveness, I'm glad that the CEO showed us the responsiblity seriously.
In order to prevent the outage, I would like to request that intuit investigates the cause of the issue and learn from this outage.
June 18, 2010 at 10:30 am
We have 2 small business using quick books & payroll. sofar we haven't found any problems since comming back on line.this was not devestating to us just inconvient.please note to everyone out there intuit is only one piece of the whole system.phone lines,cable lines,YOUR LINES OF COMUNICATIONS,any one of these if broken will end in same result (No service). Thank you quickbooks for getting us back up and running as quickly as possible. FULL STEAM AHEAD.
June 18, 2010 at 10:37 am
You must have missed the apology. This stated that they "Intuit" had a power outage during a maintenance run, on a weekday and this caused BOTH systems, primary and backup to fail. Now that's totaly an Intuit problem not a communication etc. problem. Most importantly why was BOTH systems in the same place running on the same power grid. That's the real problem and shows that Intuit does not have adequate facilities to handle this type of critical data. By the way, this is the third outage I have had in the last few months not the first.
June 18, 2010 at 10:30 am
We run 5 diffrent companies managing over 12 bank accounts with this online software and although it was just one day If these problems do not get corrected it will eventually be on the wrong day when it happens again. We have been with QB online for over 6 years and this down time is happening more and more frequent. We are paying for a service that when it fails we remain at their mercy and that is no way to run a business. Mr. Brad needs to understand that a simple appology will not make our employees understand why they wont be getting paid if it where to happen on the wrong day. These matters are more severe to customers like us then it would be for other smaller firms. Mr. Brad please keep us informed with youre progress and any research and development you may have your engineers working on tho avoid these problems.
June 18, 2010 at 11:12 am
While I appreciate the hard work done to bring the system back on line, I had 6 hours that I could not respond to my customers, I could not invoice nor post any payments received.
Besides the fact that I could not perform my responsiblities – my customers suffered as well.
This is the 3rd time in the last two months that QuickBooks Online has been down for significant periods of time. I would like a refund as well.
June 18, 2010 at 11:37 am
June 18, 2010 at 11:39 am
Why are they doing maintenance on a week day???
One of my customers does maintenance only Sunday morning at 2 AM to 6 AM to prevent loss of service to customers (as most people are not awake at 2 AM, just us IT folks).
And the lack of redundancy, already beat into the ground here, is shocking. Why this hasn't shown up above the fold of the Wall Street Journal? How many businesses were idled by this dumb mistake?
June 18, 2010 at 11:40 am
If I was to get so upset over an incident like this, the loss of money or time. I would be in a box tomorrow. Communication is key. If you have clients that expect something now, ask them to produce the heavens in one day.
I appreciate the communication Intuit has graciously upheld with their subscribers. We have used QBOE for 4 years. Sometimes you just have to get on the phone, which has down times as well, and call a few people to explain the situation. Getting upset and frizzed will only make matters worse.
Thank You Intuit
Great Product!!
June 18, 2010 at 11:43 am
I have been using quickbooks online for over five years and am very happy with the service. I understand outages happen, all is well now. I will continue using and recommending quickbooks online.
June 18, 2010 at 11:50 am
Quickbooks online is not for everybody. It works very well for a small company like us. We can easily make paper paychecks, we can go on our bank's website and pay bills, we have alternate templates for estimates, and if we had a delay of a day or two processing our invoices it would not be the end of the world. There is always another way to get things done.
I think that if your company is large enough that having your accounting software unavailable to you for one or two days is going to cause you great financial harm, then you should purchase your own software and make sure you back it up every day and take the disk home with you.
I was not happy about the software being unavailable either . . . but being a web development company with lots of servers and data . . . can certainly understand that bad things can happen. Sounds like you had the "perfect storm".
June 18, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Would like to see acknowledgment of failure to deliver contracted services via refund or credit. Responsible businesses do the responsible thing; c'mon Intuit, step up and demonstrate your resolve tangibly.
June 18, 2010 at 1:35 pm
No refund for me! I have been using QB Online for two years and this is the first full day of an outage I have ever had. My computers go down all the time and I don't get a refund from the Manufactures. Keep up the good work and thanks for how reliable QB Online is.
Have a great day,
Joe Smith
FastSigns of Chesapeake VA.
June 18, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Joe you are missing the critical issue that this incident has revealed. The point being that evidently Intuit has ONE location for the primary and backup and it runs on the same power grid. This time a power issue took us down for two or three days. What if the next time it is a fire or natural disaster at that ONE location and the whole facility is destroyed. ALL of your data and mine is gone. That's the point. I don't want a refund. I don't want another apology. I want to know for sure that Intuit will setup and redundant server(s) at another geographical location to protect our data and data availablilty in the future. Would it be accecptable to you for your bank to have one geographical location only that stored your banking data. No, we see the need for more. Another solution yet not as good would be for Intuit to give us the ability to perform TRUE data backups that we could run locally in an emergency like this week. After all the desktop edition provides this.
June 18, 2010 at 1:38 pm
your comparing your SaaS to your computer hardware? Really?
June 18, 2010 at 2:46 pm
While QB is a good product and stuff happens, this incident is a testament to the rudimentary infrastructure in place at QB, perhaps both in staffing and hw/sw. From our perspective, it couldn't have occured at a worse time … we were literally being reviewed for our annual credit line audit – where daily cash flow is the most critical factor. Since our business is primarily credit card transactions, our cash flow over this incident was atrocious and now QB has been identified as a weak link in our overall system by the audit team. Even worse, we use QB for several (but not all) of our businesses.
I expect some type of financial consideration; a better understanding of who designed your existing "routine" maintenance plan; and when we can expect a new design from a new team.
June 18, 2010 at 4:03 pm
We all know that QBO can be the lifeline of their business. I'm in a business where we access QBO from several global locations. We must rely on it and depending on time zone, someone is working online somewhere.
But, gosh, some of you could use a little cheese with that "whine".
Intuit at least provides solutions that for the most part DOES work. I sure hope that if one of your employees screw up, you would only answer to the ones that were affected by the screw-up and hopefully stay quiet with the ones that did not notice. Really…Would you be paying every customer you had a refund? …honestly …lets see: If BP would deliberately comp the whole public (regardless of whether they are affected)10 cents a gal at every pump that would be nice… even for a day. But please don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
There's an old motto I go by… If you don't make mistakes, you are not working hard enough. As long as Intuit learns and grows from it. Power to them! If they don't, then shame on them.
But, at least the CEO comes forward in some kind of matter. I pray BP would get the hint. Try finding a blog hosted on BP's site, where the CEO – or any exec for that fact can hear the public's voice (pro and con).
Just for that, I believe Intuit is holding themselves accountable and that in itself,is good enough for me to accept their apologies.
June 18, 2010 at 4:10 pm
This should cause Intuit to rethink their policy concerning the customer's ability to backup and use their information on a local computer. Our company uses Apple computers, so at the moment everything resides on Quickbooks Online because we can not perform a local backup without using Windows. Even then I don't think we could use it in a local copy of Quickbooks. We trusted Intuit and believed our information was "safe" online, but now that promise seems hollow, and we will be looking for other options ASAP.
June 18, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Good Point. What would it take for Intuit to make a lite version, where data can later be synced in the event of an outage?
June 18, 2010 at 8:37 pm
My accountant now wants me to buy the desktop version of QB so I will have my info next time this happens. Intuit failed to provide what they have promised, NO WAY am I going to throw more $ at Intuit in order to remedy their issues.
A different accounting program is definately in my future.
June 18, 2010 at 5:11 pm
[…] A letter from the CEO To our customers, […]
June 18, 2010 at 5:16 pm
My bookkeeping services business relies on QuickBooks Online. I want an automatic daily backup sent to me every night. I want to know I have access to my data even if there are internet, server, or whatever problems in the clouds. I want data on my desk so I can work.
June 20, 2010 at 7:13 am
The back-up file from QB Online is purposefully not fully functional. They either have to deliver a fully functional back-up file or fix this back-up mess.
June 18, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Would like to know if Intuit's backup systems will now include servers in a different part of the country / part of the world so that it could never be the case that the primary servers and backup servers could both go down. Some Silicon Valley companies have backup servers in Texas and Europe, for example. A massive event like earthquake or other power failure could take out all the servers in an entire region, but it is easy to set it up that there most region-specific risk is eliminated. Thanks
June 18, 2010 at 7:17 pm
After reading all these post I think the best thing that Intuit could do is have the CEO give us his plan to assure us that they will be relocating the servers to different regions, have a way to back up to your local hard drive and sync later, only do maintenance on the weekends, and offer some type of compensation to only the users that were affected as a good faith gesture. It really is that simple, so come on Brad let's get the right IT people in place and make it happen so this does not happen for the 4th time.
June 18, 2010 at 8:00 pm
LOL @ a month's reimbursement for two days loss of service. Glad my customers don't expect a refund 28 times larger than the original cost of their purchase. I shall have to try that next time I am in Walmart. Let's get realistic, if any of us were a large enough company we wouldn't be using QB. QB's primary customer base is the small business which is why we all have time to be on here fretting and fussing over a couple of days inconvenience. Power company isn't going to give you a month of free utilities for a downed line and neither should QB. And if QB did offer all affected customers a refund who do you think is really going to foot that bill? Us next year when the price increases to reflect the loss.
If QB being down for a couple of days is the biggest hurdle you had to jump this month in recession America, count yourself among the lucky few. Put a sock in it and get back to work;)
June 18, 2010 at 8:41 pm
If you were selling a product with multiple moving parts, and one of those parts didn't work, would you offer your customers a parial discount based on the amount of funtionality and call it good? Get real.
June 19, 2010 at 4:30 am
Wow, I wasn't aware there was a better, more "Perfect" alternative out there.
I make mistakes everyday, sometimes even two, lol.
I try to learn from them, and then move on.
How could have anyone known that quickbooks would have some many perfect businesses as clients. I know that they probably planned this outage just because they knew I needed an invoice from the road.
People wake up!
Nothing is perfect, 100% of the time, and to jump ship in hopes of finding that is idiotic.
Thanks for hanging in there Brad. One thing I've learned is that if you have 10% of your clients requiring 80% of your time ( and causing many headaches), lose them and gain much more. Just a suggestion.
Your product does what its supposed to, and even though its a little higher priced than what I'd prefer, it rocks!!!
June 19, 2010 at 6:37 am
I agree that computers can and will have outages, but not for days. The outage is one thing, I think the biggest fault is the poor communication. I would hope that the senior management team was being updated on a regular basis, why not communicate that progress on the webiste. Communicating to your customers helps manage the expectations.
Lastly, this extended outage makes me question if Intuit has a Active Business Continuity Plan in place.
June 19, 2010 at 5:47 am
Guys, we bought an ONLINE service to manage our books. What would you do if your internet connection went down for a few hours? The same thing.
If access to your data is so demanding that it will completely disrupt your business not to have it for a day, or even a few hours, then having quickbooks on your desktop is not enough. If you had quickbooks on your computer, and your computer crashed, you could be down for days or even maybe loose all of your data. You should consider purchasing a server with a backup redundant server in another location and a second internet connection in case that one goes down.
Or just pay the $30 or so bucks that QBO service costs and be done with it.
June 19, 2010 at 6:28 am
This is a HUGE issue regarding the Business Continuity of Quickbooks. Credits to all customers affected is the least Intuit should do. The first thing is to FIRE the CIO. I understand that outages can and will happen (not for days…), but the lack of communication to your customers is unacceptable. The is poor management and should be addressed. Putting a quote on the website "We'll be back soon" is a slap in the face. You are an internet company, use the internet to communicate. Have the site updated hourly with a progress report, contact your customers, and be proactive on your communication.
Also, I requested an email to be sent to me when the site was available, the site came up at 2:00pm and I got my email at 6:04pm. Knowing the critical nature of this site, why the 4 hour delay. I this just another example of poor management?
Lastly, I know that these comments are just to vent, becaused based on the customer service that Intuit provides, I'm sure no one reads these, much less actually take the recommendations.
My thought.
June 19, 2010 at 6:52 am
I will say the same thing to Brad what I said to Suchi:
"A world-class internet company like Intuit should not be subject to the kind of outage to which we, your customers, were made to bear. Your data centers should have the kinds of redundancies and safeguards that would assure 99.9999% uptime.
We lost business opportunities because we cannot send out proposals. Our cashflows suffered because invoices and statements cannot be transmitted.
You have to make it right and someone's head should roll for lack of foresight."
June 19, 2010 at 7:38 am
It never fails when we need to do payroll and we need access RIGHT THEN, the system is down. In the last year this program has become more and more unstable and franky you guys need to get your act together.
I had to pay overnight fees to do payroll the NEXT day and still get checks to my office staff on time, and this has happened countless times.
I am getting sick of the down time and frankly a "letter" just is not good enough – a credit for long term customers is in order and what are you going to do about the recurring downtime.
I know you are a big company, but you need to act like you are not and remember cost is not the only factor in doing business with you – you need to be reliable as close to 100% of the time as possible and that is what we are paying you for – to handle that for us.
Laura – Ecommerce Industry CEO
June 19, 2010 at 8:51 am
First of all, you guys are brave to allow comments on this posting. I hope they are all being read by someone who's not an "intern assigned to read the comments".
In my opinion, two things would make this right:
1) Proactively crediting at least a month's fees to every company affected. Don't make people ask for this one at a time, just do it. It's the right thing to do. It will probably reduce your call center volume too since people don't have to call one at a time ans ask.
2) Get a redundant datacenter in a second location. I know this can't happen overnight, but there are a plethera of Cloud operators out there who can assist you with this. Just do it.
When a complaints about uptime outweigh the complaints about features, you have utterly and completely failed. Get back on track. Actions speak louder than words.
Do it.
June 19, 2010 at 9:27 am
Call me crazy, but I went through and read every comment & reply, just to get some kind of consensus, and then formulate my own response.
I have had some issues using QBO, and I have cursed their name a few times, but for the most part, I am glad they are their, bottom line is they save me a ton of time.
The disturbing thing I read is that most people either know or are guessing that QB does not have another system somewhere else as a back up…… that is quite alarming. If this is the case (and common sense tells me it is, due to the wording of the apology letter)then all of us need to take the time to inundate there system with letters and phones calls demanding a call for action, not only that but actual proof that they have done just that. If we all just stand by and hope I can promise all of you it will never happen.The old adage "the squeaky wheel get the grease".
Tell them to take the money everyone wants as a refund and spend it on a few off site located back ups and faster server equipment.
I plan on making that call Monday or until I get through, I am actually going to ask to talk to the man Brad, and be polite and to the point on my suggestion, I hope he does not hide behind another person, I hope he stands up and takes every single constructive concerned call, he does not how ever have to get cursed at or berated, I hope we are all grown-ups and can handle this better than what we see in today's world.
Good Fortunes to all and may GOD bless all of you
June 19, 2010 at 10:03 am
It wouldn't be so bad, but on the QBO webpage you will read the following sales pitch:
"Work when and where you want."
"It's all online. All the time."
To me, that indicates something more than what we are actually getting.
Reading the legal stuff, you will find the following:
So I guess we have no leg to stand on. However, as consumers, we hold the ultimate power to bring Intuit to our demands. Just like term limit in congress, we don't like the politicians, vote them out. With Intuit, our money is our vote. If most of the Intuit consumers got together with a single voice and decided to stop paying for their service if a demand is not met, then what do you think they will do?
Me personally, I am upset that this happened and don't think I'm owed compensation for the downtime. However, I do expect Intuit to work at a solution to where if a problem like this happens again, there will be no downtime for their users.
I accept the appology and look forward to new and better inovations with QBO.
June 19, 2010 at 1:29 pm
I admit that we only use QuickBooks on a weekly rather than daily basis, so this outage did not impact us. But "in my other life" I work for a large multi-national corporation. They too have these types of outages and unfortunately, can only blame themselves. As long as we want to use technology for our services, perhaps we should be willing to accept the consequences of its imperfections. Is there somebody out there who is offering a perfect system that never fails? Instead of complaining to folks who are trying to do their best, let's take our business to the one guaranteeing no glitches.
June 19, 2010 at 3:06 pm
As the self-appointed defender of Intuit, defend this: Intuit's service outage impacted many, many businesses. These businesses form a significant part of the economy. Putting their financial software on hold for close to two business days affected billions of dollars worth of commerce. We do expect more from Intuit because they should have had redundancies in place.
Intuit had revenues of over $3B last year (see: http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_release/articles/2009/IntuitReportsSolid2009FiscalYearResults.html). Don't you think they could have set up redundant data centers? Internet companies a fraction of their size implement these as a matter of best practice.
"Best Practices" — that is a term you should start being familiar with, Peggy Reno. What you are espousing and defending is mediocrity. If that is good enough for you, it is not for the rest of us American businesspeople.
My advice to you: stop shooting from the hip and get your facts.
June 20, 2010 at 7:08 am
There are always failures, that is part of the human condition. However, co-locating a backup system with the primary system is something no major corporation I am familiar with does. What large multi-national company does this? I am not aware of any.
I do not mind cascading failures that are too expensive to insure against. A simultaneous eathquake in California, coincident with an asteroid strike in Europe would be an example. A power failure at co-located primary and back-up servers ON THE SAME POWER GRID, is NOT an acceptable business practice.
June 19, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Not only does QBO apparently & alarmingly not have redundant systems sufficient to prevent this sort of outage, but also apparently the QBO CEO doesn't have a last name. Doesn't anyone else find this puzzling/rude?
June 19, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Well, Brad hangs out with other single-name types like Cher, Madonna and Satan.
June 19, 2010 at 6:45 pm
LOL VY. You crack me up. I skimmed over you comment several times, assuming the last name was Santana. Haha It's much funnier when it reads "Satan"!!!
Thanks for the humor, that's about all I've got right now……I want to SHAKE Mr.Brad!!
June 19, 2010 at 7:02 pm
Maybe I should have said "Lucifer."
June 20, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Here we go again. I do my work on weekends and this Saturday i,e 06/19/2010 it was down again.I lost my weekend because I didn't schedule anything else because I had to work.I believe the site was down for more then 4 hours.
Offer us a good reimbursement for our wasted Saturday night.
June 19, 2010 at 4:34 pm
They are off line AGAIN! How acceptable is this to you now, all of you "mistakes happen, get over it" people? Hope u don't run you don't run your own companies with the same "oh well, deal with it" attitude. I am so done with qb!
June 19, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Apparently, QBO is unaware that they are off line. When you call the number on the screen it says" we are happy to say that both services are up and running. NOT ANYMORE! Hello? Are you out there? FIX IT!!!!!
June 19, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Ahh, they figured it out. They changed the message to the same useless recording from the other day. However, this doesn't help me imput my sales for the day.
June 19, 2010 at 4:50 pm
June 19, 2010 at 6:11 pm
That's it for me. I had Intuit send me a backup on Friday just in case this happened again soon as I thought it would. There were obviously more problems than they were telling us. I have no confidence in this company any longer. I was not for any kind of refund before as I hoped Intuit would step up and assure they would setup redundant servers in different locations and give us the ability to make our own backups at will. I now believe we were not being told the truth from the beginning of this incident and have lost all confidence in this service. The next time, maybe this time our data may be lost or corrupt. So long Intuit.
June 19, 2010 at 6:22 pm
is amazing, i was going to backup today after catching up. bad things happens to everyone and everything but the reliable ones are the one with a real plan B and plan C. to have all in the same location is just old school and non prepared i.t. staff. is there any other online accounting company like qbo?
June 19, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Down again!!!
Three words, Intuit: redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. That means data centers in different geographical regions. The SEC requires this of large financial institutions; the same should be demanded of you.
Somebody should really, really, really, really get fired for this — for starters, all the people with "Chief" in their title.
This is unfathomable, unforgiveable and indefensible.
June 19, 2010 at 8:31 pm
Down again. Unbelievable. I have six companies down. Those of you that say we should just suck it up obviously don't have as much invested in QuickBooks Online as I do. I have a small accounting/bookkeeping practice in a small town. I've been building my client base and my reputation for five years.
I convinced 6 of my 9 clients to switch to QB Online assuring them that this type of situation wasn't possible because Intuit has offsite backups and redundancies set in place. I told them that one of the biggest benefits to switching is that our server would never go down again because we would be on Intuits server and they would never allow servers to be down for more than a few hours.
I based my reputation on my trust in QuickBooks, now I have failed all of my clients. They are all righteously frustrated and I promised them all I would catch up on everything over the weekend. Now QB is down again and it looks like I will have to fail my clients again.
While I wait for QB to be restored, I am researching other online accounting systems and to my surprise there are a few possible options.
June 20, 2010 at 7:00 am
We would be interested in your research. I have failed to come up with a viable alternative, but this week's adventure is certainly motivational.
June 20, 2010 at 7:07 am
Put the desktop version on a computer and use logmein.com for remote access & Sugarsync for realtime backup.
June 20, 2010 at 7:16 am
Oh and use Paycycle for payroll (imports to QB) better than QB payroll and free direct deposit.
June 22, 2010 at 9:23 am
Yes, thank you Lou. That is certainly an alternative. No one in their right mind would use QB for payroll. We certainly do not. They inspire zero confidence in a critical application.
June 19, 2010 at 10:27 pm
I am so very sorry that some of our services (QuickBooks Online, ProLine Tax Online & Merchant Services as well as others) have been affected by an outage. We're working aggressively to resolve a hardware system issue and we've made some progress correcting the problem. We are beginning to bring some applications back online. However, there is still more work to be done. It continues to be all-hands on deck.
We have failed to live up to the high standard of dependability that we set for ourselves and for you. There is no excuse for the negative impact we've had your livelihoods this past week.
Heather Kirkby
Director Product Management and Marketing, QuickBooks Online
June 19, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Hey it happened again today…
WT??? is going on, do you want us to work …
Is it QB-Online or QB-offline, time to switch to something else.
June 19, 2010 at 10:44 pm
"Sorry" does not feed the bulldog anymore.
One word for everyone in Intuit responsible for this mess: QUIT. Let smarter, more forward-thinking people take over the job for which you are obviously overpaid.
June 20, 2010 at 6:57 am
Quickbooks has simply ignored one of the primary rules of a Disaster Recovery Plan. You must locate back-up facilities in a different geography. I've never seen this rule ignored in even the smallest and least sophisticated organization, so how, and why, would they ignore this simple rule? No doubt they saved money by co-locating the backup and primary facilities. However, I was assured they had back-up facilities in different locations. The question I have is what am I being told that is either wrong or inflated? Do they have these systems in place or do they plan on adding them? When?
Why, if they can't guarantee a back-up system in another location, do they supply us with a 'diabled' back-up file that we can download? If they cannot do a simple disaster recovery plan, then why should they give me a back-up capability that I can only initiate on my own with a crippled local file?
If Quickbooks will not spend the money to do a credible back-up, then the least they can do is allow a full local download for my file. I cannot trust that they are doing the job, given recent evidence.
June 20, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I spoke with a computer specialist at Avaya today. He says that Intuit DOES have redundant services in multiple geographic locations, therefore, the explanation of a "power outage" is a lie. The other possibility is that QBO made a catastrophic error within their own networking, which reflects badly on the company…..much worse than the idea of a simple power failure.
Notice, no one from QBO dompany has defended any of the comments that have been made here with reasons, only apologies.
They are not giving us the whole truth on order to hide the real problem. Believe what you will….
June 20, 2010 at 7:31 am
QuickBooks came back online in the middle of the night. All our other services are back online too. I'm deeply sorry for the effect that our service outage had on you and your business. I know many of you were trying to catch up from our outage earlier in the week. We appreciate your patience in what has been, understandably, a very frustrating experience.
The Intuit team continues to monitor our systems closely. We are still looking into these outages to fully understand the root cause and what we can do to get better. Thank you for your patience.
Heather Kirkby
Director Product Management and Marketing, QuickBooks Online
June 20, 2010 at 8:54 am
ENOUGH ALREADY!!!! Two outages in a week, both times I was working online when they went out and all my work was lost. Now thatnks to Intuit, I'm rushing (ON FATHER'S DAY) to get a sizable invoice out to my customer by Monday 8:00 a.m. that was a week and half of work for two mechanics on site.
THANK YOU for blowing my Father's Day plans with my family. I cannot express how extremely disappointed I am in your service, and all the "we're sorry for the outages" just don't cut it.
If I just randomly didn't deliver my customers' services and said "sorry", I'd be out of business …. I guess that's why I get paid AFTER services rendered and Intuit get their money before services rendered.
June 20, 2010 at 10:41 am
In addition to an apology letter, I believe that you need to make a monetary reimbursement of our fees. # of days outage times our daily fee based upon our annual fee seems appropriate to me. Anything less than that seems inappropriate. Your level of service last week was unacceptable to say the least; and you need to step up for those of us who have been committed to your on-line program.
June 20, 2010 at 10:56 am
Outage! Who cares? Using the online service to update my books is so pathetically slow…when it works at all… it is faster just to input it by hand. And I pay for this??? It is quite crap. Very disappointed in intuit. Not the greatest company on caring about service. I keep thinking 'My god this has to get better'. But alas, no, it's still crap…that I pay for.
June 20, 2010 at 11:58 am
Ok, not again. We have been using QB online for a couple of years now and has been ok for us. Although we don't use it everyday, it has worked just fine. I hope that your Disaster Recovery Plan wasn't like the oil company's plan, protecting walruses and all. We all know that DR cost money and time. We all know disasters happen that shouldn't. You ned to learn for this and implement a 1st rate, state-of-the-art system. I think we should be compensated for the down time … prorated. Don't let this happen again.
June 20, 2010 at 12:04 pm
A quick update to let folks know that our support lines are open until 4pm PST today (Sunday 6/20). You can reach us at 1800 286 6800.
Heather Kirkby
Director Product Management and Marketing, QuickBooks Online
June 20, 2010 at 8:36 pm
… at least the phone company keeps their equipment up and running.
June 20, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Outage two times in a row within the same week. Is there any problem/issue that we as the customer should know?
June 20, 2010 at 3:53 pm
It was not two hours, but one full day for us… Luckily we had our old system still in place…
June 20, 2010 at 4:48 pm
I haven't read other posts so this may have been mentioned.
I've never liked that there is no form of backup I can have on my computer where I could at least access essential data and basic fubctions. I feel customers are held hostagte to continually renew or lose the ability to acess older data (past years).
June 21, 2010 at 3:29 am
For Us those two downtimes was DEVASTATING, cause on May 15 adn 16 our "Half Year Auditing" was schedule to occur, now our there is a delay on our "second half year donation", cause the auditors are now auditing others Non Government Organizations and we have to wait for another schedule.
Is not that the failure took one day or two, is the date they occur.
Now we are looking for another software solution (off-line), we lost confidence on on-line accounting software.
June 21, 2010 at 5:04 am
My issue is that there is nobody on weekends to let know you have an outage. I was running payroll and working on budget revisions when you went down Saturday. There was nobody to tell because you were closed for even emergency notifications.
June 21, 2010 at 6:10 am
Thank you for the notification of returned service the first time the system went down. No notification the second time. A compensation would be appreciated, however we don't want to put you out of business. I would think you could afford it with all the income you make from all of us. We are going to stick with you as we are sure you will work this out. Usually great service even though somewhat slower lately.
June 21, 2010 at 7:12 am
It it posible that the recent service outage caused errors in the data?
I have some sum errors on my sub-bank accounts.
As you can see for:
total is: 319,734.75
the system report: 286,272.70
I spend MANY hours trying to see where the problem is, but It should be right.
June 21, 2010 at 7:35 am
Accidents happen. I've been generally happy with the QB products we use. While the outage was inconvenient and nerve racking, I'm willing to give QB a mulligan on this one. If it were to happen again then I would assume that QB was negligent and I would seek other programs. However if QB is the high quality organization I think it is, then they'll take this opportunity to improve quality and service.
June 21, 2010 at 8:47 am
You have not been using QB Online long enough. They have gone down in the past and all you get is "check back in an hour" Switch now and save yourself the headache!
June 21, 2010 at 8:35 am
This is at least the third time this year the service has been down. I called the other two times and received the standard, "we are working on it". How long do you anticipate it will be down? "we are working on it". I am a QB proadvisor with 25 clients online. That doesn't go far to resolve my clients difficulties AND it doesn't make me look good either. I have written emails and discussed with QB operators…. one even went so far as to basically hang up on me.
This is not the way this is supposed to work.
June 21, 2010 at 8:39 am
Not happy. Last year when I reported a programing error in addition in the invoice paying page and I was told that it wasn't a problem since it didn't get transmitted to any other module. I was shocked that someone would treat a problem reported in that fashion. I had to explain why I relied on that number being added correctly since I used the invoice page differently than I guess most people. They did fix it many weeks later. I still check the number to make sure it's correct.
I expect 1 year Free service for Quickbooks online. Do the right thing.
June 21, 2010 at 9:02 am
I appreciate the appology but I consider it crass to desplay your ads with the appology. Not too sincere!
June 21, 2010 at 9:11 am
We where completely down for almost two days, during which we had to write out our invoices by hand. We believe that one months cost which we pay to intuit should be reimbursed due to the negative affects on our business and clients.
June 21, 2010 at 9:27 am
I have to go back to all the customers that I did calls for and bill them onsite. This is a considerable cost- The thing that concerns me the most is I was told not to worry about backing up data. Intuit said with the redundant system they have, no way can the data be lost. Well, it just happened.
June 21, 2010 at 9:44 am
I was going to comment, but the comment system went down
so here is my comment, WOW Intuit is getting as bad as MS
June 21, 2010 at 10:34 am
Thank you for the apology. We have been using QB for over a year and this is the only major delay. Customer service is great, too. Thank you!!
June 21, 2010 at 10:47 am
I am a QuickBooks Online customer. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts about your recent outages. I don't have much hope you will act on these thoughts, but can always hope…….
Your recent downtime caused us some pain but no real financial loss. We didn't bounce any checks. 2 of us were going to do some invoicing, but couldn't. I was going to update my expiring credit card used for service payment. Not the end of the world. If we were bigger we wouldn't be so lucky. We dodged a bullet, and fried a few brain cells.
Let's talk about what your outage did do for us…..
I have 2 other small businesses. I was planning to move them both over to QBOL. That's not going to happen now, and I am re-evaluating my options. There is no way I am going to continue risking my financial data with you folks at this point. Here's why:
1) You have demonstrated in a rather spectacular way just how poorly prepared you are to handle important business data. I admit I didn't read all the fine print when I signed up…. but I assumed based on your size and reputation that this data would be secure and that there would be significant redundancies. If I wanted to blow away my accounting system for a few days, I could do that myself. In fact I have done that. I trusted you to do a much better job than I can do myself.
2) I now realize how vulnerable I am to internet service interruptions. Any failure in connectivity will prevent us from counting our beans. Which leads to the real deal breaker…….
3) You refuse to provide a synchronized desktop version that would allow us to keep working – regardless of the reason or need. Many of us have requested this capability, yet you don't respond to those requests. We have no idea if you are working on that capability or if you have no intention of ever allowing it. Which leads to what may be the ultimate deal killer for me…..
4) Your communications with users are not very good and I don't have much faith in what you guys say. This outage was just one more in a long line of poor communications. The explanations you have given don't smell right to me. I assume this philosophy starts at the top, so is unlikely to change. You do a fine job of asking for my money. You are very good at trying to sell me new services. You are lousy at treating me as a valued customer. In fact, you managed to email me a reminder- which I received during this outage – reminding me to update my credit card. Obviously getting my money is very very important to you. I wish providing the service was that important to you.
If you want to get my attention, here's what you need to do:
>> Provide a believable explanation of the recent service outages, and a plan that shows the steps you are taking to make sure this never happens again. Keep us informed about implementation of this plan.
>> Provide a synchronized desktop version that allows me to function when the online version isn't reachable.
>> Provide a continually updated roadmap of where QBOL is going so I can decide if the feature set matches my needs – or is likely to match my needs in the future.
June 21, 2010 at 11:04 am
Like QB, we also operate a company. And you know what? We aren't perfect either. Things like this happen and it appears no great losses occured. I would hate to think we would get attacked like this everytime a little glitch occured in my company.
It made me think of the many months and years we rocked along with pretty much flawless service from QB. There are few companies out there with the kind of record they have. I'm glad for the service they perform. Cut them a little slack.
June 21, 2010 at 11:33 am
i gots chillun to feed, cant affords no mo downtimes.
June 21, 2010 at 12:08 pm
I am generally satisfied with QB. However, my comments below are directed at how communications surrounding the outage were handled. I convey them in hopes that they will be taken constructively and lead to future improvements in communicating with customers:
1) Communication was lacking. The "we are down" page was lacking in information and never updated throughout the outage. This led to much hand-wringing, leaving me in the unhappy place of wondering if all my company's financial information had been lost. To the extent that you knew that data was secure, reassurance during the event that this was a power outtage, and not an information loss would have gone a long way with this customer.
2) Communication was lacking. I added my email address to be notified when service was restored. I was notified by email at 5:17 pm on 6/17 that services were restored – nearly a full business day after services were actually restored. Thankfully I had checked the website on my own and was able to do my work. Had I relied on QB to notify me about the restoration as promised, I would have lost a whole business day of work. Why the delay?
Thank you for reading this.
June 23, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Response to CJ: YES – my thoughts exactly on the communication errors, especially the inability for QBO to notify of restored service within even an hour of restoration! I, too, had to manually check the site & find out myself, and also got my email at 5:02pm. On that note, during the previous outage on 4/23, when I requested an email when restored, I got SIX emails!
Out of Service page should definitely include TIME ZONE info in its time last updated area, etc. I work from home and had scheduled many hours for that Thurs, leaving me to work marathon hours Fri & Sat to make up for lost productivity.
June 21, 2010 at 6:43 pm
This is it for us. First outage we were doing taxes. Now we have to submit corrected filling. Second time delayed corrected filing and 3 days of data entry.
We are now using MobileMe to manage our data. Local program with data available in multiple places. Works great for us. We now have our data on our own server, PC's, Mac's, Iphones and available at Me.com. Everything stays sync'd automatically… We have better protection than what is offered here.
Had this been the case here none of us would have lost any time or sales.
Maybe this type of service is due to the merger of Intuit and Microsoft… could just be another "microsoft feature" or maybe just "aroundtuit".
June 21, 2010 at 8:44 pm
If we all looked at ourselves to reflect when at least once in our life we created a "glich", there would not be so much judging and finger pointing.
Jim Mastin Sr. says it so nicely.
Thanks QB for your quick response to such a small issue and for all the apologies that show professionalism and care towards us your clients!! I took advantage of the time down to use good old school ledger input by hand..:-)Then transfered to QB when up and running..made me appreciate it more!!!
Have a great day ya'll!
June 22, 2010 at 5:47 am
This is the second ALL DAY outage in just a few months. I know my customers would certainly not stand for this kind of service glitch from my company over and over. I see a note on my QB home page that maintenance is happening again tonight, and of course wonder if I will have service tomorrow, or just another apology letter in a couple days.
June 22, 2010 at 6:22 am
You people all have way too much time on your hands!! Go to work!!!
June 22, 2010 at 6:26 am
You should practice what you preach. You must have too much time on your hands as well as you are obviously reading these post and commenting. The fact is this has caused people real time and money in some cases. Intuit does not have the proper IT plan to protect our data. This should be a concern of yours as well.
June 22, 2010 at 6:32 am
I think everyone was affected differently from the outages in terms of actual down time and in terms of time and money lost from the outage. We went down at 7pm on Tuesday and were not back up until 315 on Thursday afternoon. I use Quickbooks all day at the office and login at home as well to update employee time from the day and create invoices. This was a HUGE loss for us. QuickBooks has been great, until more recently they have had more outages which last for longer periods of time. I think everyone should be concerned for their data.
June 22, 2010 at 10:31 am
Thank you for the apology, I appreciate your sincerity. I hope that you guys are able to learn from the issues and are now able prevent it from happening in the future. That's all I ask.
June 22, 2010 at 10:58 am
As a 25 year IT professional and executive I would encourage your management team to focus on fixing the problem and not the blame. I have developed time sensitive software in the payment processing industry as well run data centers and IT departments and can tell you that this kind of thing happens. You could triple your IT budget and the same kind of outage will happen.
I'm sure your staff is exhausted and doing their best. I would ask this question; In every organization there is only one maybe two key players (techs) who are emotionally attached to their work and your product and worth more than their weight in gold. Are you taking care of them?
June 22, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Every online system should have a "back-up" plan for the "back-up' plan as contingency. I also lost time and money waiting for the service to be restored. Not to mention the stress it causes when ALL your financial data is on a system you have no access to! and there was no consistent information coming through about what was happening, why and what we could expect. I agree, an apology is not acceptable. Please put your money where your mouth is!
June 22, 2010 at 12:24 pm
It's not so much the down time. All the fingerpointing and condemning in the world won't help bring the lost revenue back. Venting doesn't really help in the long run. Accidents do happen. People (and technology) aren't perfect. We all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
However, we're certain that the timing of this was very unfortunate for you, as it happened just as you were telling us how sure you were that we'd enjoy your new, much more expensive product. To be honest, in our business, we were already looking for alternatives. We can't keep giving out pieces of American pie and have any of it left over for the proprietors. Certainly, a much more expensive product must at least be secure and reliable.
So yes, you'll probably lose some customers, more so now than before. I guess we'll have to buy the boxed mix instead.
June 23, 2010 at 5:34 am
No Problem. It happens, all my data was secure. Intuit always has tried to answer questions and help out. Its not like you dumped millions of gallons of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico
June 23, 2010 at 10:21 am
For all small businesses who could not function — it was a HUGE problem. But asking for serious dollars or serious free time could potentially devestate QB, when we consider all the customers who would have to get compensated. If you like the product, please don't ask for months of compensation. QB may not be able to comply without a serious impact to their finances, which equates to the highest cost to all of us — employees. I would not want to see QB cut back on staff and not be able to help me when I need help. Perhaps another way to compensate is to keep the renewal cost the same for one year, if the economics works out for QB.
June 23, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Intuit Executive Team,
We recently subscribed to your services for the efficient and secure nature of your platform. My biggest concern in deciding whether we continue as customers is why there wasn't a redundant server in another region or city and why they were both connected to the same power source. Having a redundant server in another geographic area is a vital and critical element of disaster recovery planning and I'm bewildered that a technology company such as yourself providing a vital business product would not have taken such an elementary action step in planning Uptime in an online business product offering.
We as a small business rely on Up time and Accessibility of your services. That is the key reason that we decided to subscribe to your services and not host our own Accounting systems. The loss of business continuity and interruption costs far more than a couple of servers hosting our accounting services. We chose your services for the perceived value of almost being guaranteed that we wouldn't these potentially crippling issues since you would have both the professional expertise and resources to ensure 99.9% up time.
Given this gross oversight in strategic planning, I no longer have confidence in your services and have lost the value proposition that I believe you would provide me as a customer. I would appreciate a frank and honest response to my comments as I contemplate our organization's decision to remain as a client.
Carlos Rodriguez, CPA
Controller, ADMI Inc.
June 23, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Wow! There is obviously more to this. First, the Primary AND Backup services were in the same location AND on the same primary power AND same backup power AND both went down and were unrecoverable.
Still waiting for a detailed report of what happened although I highly doubt that will ever come out. Make no mistake this is WAY bigger then Intuit is saying it was. Based on the statement, this was a complete and total failure of both primary and Backup systems. A failure bad enough that data was not recoverable from either the primary or backup systems, that's why they had to go to a restore. You don't need to bring services up one at a time unless you have to set everything up from scratch on new hardware because your disaster recovery plan was a total failure.
This happened during a "Routine Maintenance Event". So let me get this straight, purely by coincidence, there was an unrelated complete and total power failure while routine maintenance was being performed? Really? The kind of maintenance that was being performed had the potential to knock out the entire system and it is considered routine? so this kind of risk is taken often enough to be considered routine?
I run a colocation center part of our business is risk management, these events can be planned for and the communication with the customers can be handled better.
June 23, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Thank you for your help and your communications. S__t happens. Everyone was most helpful
July 14, 2010 at 11:33 am
Brad, you suck! Not even a month later and we have another outrageous in the middle of the business day and I can't access my books. Truly, truly outrageous. The best part is I see someone posted to the latest thread that you've RAISED the prices on Quickbooks! LOL. The Ironic part, due to your outage I can't find a web page that's up where I can see how much.
July 14, 2010 at 11:35 am
No one wants to hear your apologies when your system goes down on a monthly basis. I bet just like last month when we were down for 3 days in the middle of the month that YOUR billing systems are still working and OUR account will still get hit with the monthly fee in a timely manner. Us on the other hand will not be able to create invoices, have employees enter time, charge our clients for their invoices…you have stopped our business mid month billing cycle TWO MONTHS in a row. WE WILL BE SWITCHING within the week. This is RIDICULOUS! You act like our information and our daily operations don't matter. And you had all these people sticking up for you like "it happens" NO IT DOESN'T HAPPEN. QuickBook users BEWARE. This is not normal for a Saas Company. Not once in 6 years has our company (also a Saas) let our system go down for more than 2 hours – in 6 years. And the one time it happened, we had a backup. There are other options and I think we should all explore before they loose years upon years of all of our business data, leaving us screwed. But don't worry, they'll have a nice apology.
July 14, 2010 at 11:48 am
What I don't understand is if this is your new and improved version that we were supposed to be paying so much for. It looks the same as before … ???
July 15, 2010 at 11:48 am
Well, it looks like they're behind and haven't moved us over to the new system yet. I think it's the same version. So, the good news is, they're not charging us more yet.
December 3, 2010 at 12:37 am
They are not charging any thing else now. So this is the only good thing at this point of time.