For anyone who uses Inuit’s products, especially QuickBooks, you would have noticed they had a major outage with their online services yesterday.
It first happened around 9am (EST) yesterday morning. I tried to send online invoices and accept some payments but was unable to due to the outage. At first, I received blank pages that said something like please try again.
Then at around 4pm (EST) I was receiving a much nicer error page, asking users to check out the community blog or follow them on Twitter @intuit. So I followed them to keep track of the status. They did several status updates. Including these final two:
We’re beginning to restore all affected websites & services. Customers already have some access; working nonstop until full restoration.
Intuit
Intuit
Outage apparently occurred during routine maintenance. Accidental power failure affected both primary and backup systems.Intuit
Intuit
Good, I thought I was done with it. But then this morning at about 3am (EST), Intuit felt they can send me a spam direct message via Twitter to get me to partake in contest to win a small business grant worth $30,000. No thanks! Those types of things you can Tweet to your followers, but do not DM (direct message) us with that.
I am following tons of SEOs, many well-known for pushing the spam envelope. But I never get this stuff from them and don’t expect it from Intuit.
A DM with an apology for the outage would have been nice. but this, less than 12 hours after the major outage? Common Intuit!
The account was probably hacked. Contact them by email or by telephone. It is a major fail if they did it intentionally.
No, it linked to the Inuit.com domain, I checked.
The outage hasn’t been totally resolved yet, leaving many small businesses without critical services for 36+ hours and counting. But nice to see they put such priority on the spam generating machine.
That is an auto response that everyone who newly follows @intuit receives. I manage that autoresponse and apologize for not thinking to turn it off during the outage.