Power Failure KOs Intuit Sites for 24 Hours

A major site outage that knocked Intuit web sites offline for more than 24 hours was caused by a data center power failure during routine maintenance, the company said tonight. The downtime affected the Intuit.com web site and thousands of small business customers who host their websites on Quickbooks.com.

"Our preliminary investigation indicates the outage occurred during a routine maintenance procedure Tuesday night," Intuit CIO Ginny Lee said on the company's customer forum. " An accidental power failure during that procedure affected both our primary and backup systems, taking a number of Intuit websites and services offline. While power was quickly restored, we’re working diligently to validate our systems and bring them back into full operation."

As of 7:30 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday, Intuit said it was beginning to restore the web sites and services that had been offline since 7 p.m. Tuesday. The effort followed a long day of frustration for Intuit's small business hosting customers, most of whom were unable to access their web sites or process transactions.