Intuit's massive systems crash this week was complicated as efforts to solve one problem triggered more. And when the company restored power after its Internet-based services and systems went down, the restoration triggered a hardware failure. That explanation was made this week in a post by the company's chief information officer Ginny Lee.
The outage began about 10pm ET, Tuesday, June 15, during routine maintenance, Intuit has said. That coincided with a severe power outage that knocked out primary and secondary back up systems resulting in Internet applications and Web pages going down for about 24 hours. Most were restored during the morning of Thursday June 17. However, thousands of businesses virtually shut down when they were unable to use Intuit applications to perform tasks such as processing credit card payments, emailing invoices and making payroll deposits.
"The process of restoring power caused a hardware system failure. We still don’t know the root cause of that," Lee wrote in her posts.
Although restored began immediately with the use of back-data, the company had to make sure there was "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."
