The most serious outage started on June 15, lasted more than 24 hours and knocked out most Intuit online applications including credit card and payroll processing and the ability to make tax deposits. It put many small businesses out of operation for the interim. On July 20 and most of July 21, a commercial power outage knocked out QuickBase, Intuit's online development platform, and the Accountant's Copy File Transfer System.

Smith outlined the problems behind the June outage, which had earlier been described as occurring during routine maintenance. Smith related that the person performing that task "hard booted down the system and then quickly realized then quickly realized they had done the wrong thing and didn't follow procedures and power it back up." Next, the backup system didn't work because the battery failover system had been switched to manual, instead of automated" performance. No one had noticed the incorrect setting. Smith didn't add more details, but noted that, "the list went on and on and on."

After company leaders performed "an inventory of where we sit" for all the online offerings and concluded the first priority for the systems was high availability. The system was also studied by consultants who had worked at eBay. Smith noted Intuit had made the investor in its data centers and "we just "have to tighten up the execution."