Feeling In The Dark

What would you do if you were unable to access your accounting data for two days? Scary question isn’t it? Don’t think this could happen to you? … think again.

On June 16-17, Intuit’s core Web site and its QuickBooks and Quicken online sites suffered a major outage. QuickBooks online, QuickBooks credit card and payroll processing, online time tracker, QuickBooks support sites, QuickBase and others all were knocked out of service. Read More

Intuit’s QuickBooks is the industry leader in small business accounting software. Saying that Intuit is to small business accounting what Google is to search engines would not be an understatement.

ASA Research estimated that in 2005 Intuit’s SMB customers totaled 2.8 million. On May 21, Intuit reported that the number of small businesses using Intuit’s Web sites grew by 80 percent in its fiscal third quarter, to more than 300,000 customers, most of them new to the company’s small business franchise. Software-as-a-service revenue (consisting of TurboTax Online, Online Banking, Small Business accounting, Online Payroll and Intuit Website offerings) represented a third of the $1.607 billion the company recorded. Source

So how could this happen?

Here is the official explanation from Ginny Lee, Intuit’s Chief Information Officer in an open letter to their customers:

“We understand we didn’t communicate as frequently as you or we would have wanted. This issue was complicated and involved a number of Intuit applications. We did not want to share any information until we had complete confidence in it. We realize now that in times of uncertainty it is better to share updates on our progress as they occur versus waiting for complete answers, not sharing enough and leaving you feeling in the dark.

We still have unanswered questions, but we do know more and I want to share it with you.

We had an accidental power failure that brought both our primary and secondary power units down. The process of restoring power caused a hardware system failure. We still don’t know the root cause of that. To ensure full integrity across all our impacted applications, we immediately initiated a restoration process using our back up data. We also had to ensure proper sequencing in a way where both individual applications and our own enterprise applications that they rely on are restored in the most reliable and secure way before bringing them back on line. This took more time than anyone would like, but it was the safest most reliable course of action.

We will continue to look into both the root cause of the failure as well as our response so that we learn from this and get better. We appreciate your patience in what has been, understandably, a very frustrating experience.”

There are important lessons that should be learned from this story:

• No software application is 100% dependable. Sometimes we get a false sense of security that our applications and data will always be available.
• Even the industry Gorilla’s like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Intuit have technical difficulties.
• Software As A Service and Cloud Computing have pros and cons. Before selecting any application, it is important to do your due diligence and understand both sides.
• When it comes to your mission critical data, having a Plan B is not an option, but a necessity.

To learn more about the outage or how Progressive can help you to create a Plan B, please call us at 682-4990 or Email Us.