Ginny Lee, CIO at Intuit stated:

Our preliminary investigation indicates the outage occurred during a routine maintenance procedure Tuesday night. 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.

Intuit is back online sort of. Their landing page is live, but customers are still complaining about services being unavailable. Take a look at the comments at http://smallbusiness.intuit.com/blog/where-small-is-now/2010/06/intuit-service-update-4-were-back-online.html. Some business owners are complaining that they have been unable to process payroll.

In all it appears the web site was down for close to 36 hours. It appears that disaster recovery needs some serious tweaking at Intuit, if a power outage was indeed the cause of the problem.

I would still not rule out a security issue. If that is the case then law enforcement may not want Intuit to talk about it for a while. As unlikely that a power failure caused such a long service outage is, it still is not impossible that a power failure is part of the real story.

After this and other outages at times for cloud based services, some people are questioning if it makes sense to put your data “in the cloud”. This is a question that each user must answer for themselves, but in order to do that well, users need to understand the potential risks.

Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education