After an outage that left some customers with no ability to process credit cards, send invoices or make payroll deposits, Intuit said it has restored service to customer Web sites. Sites that were back up included QuickBooks Online, IntuitOnline Payroll and QuickBase. The incident started about 10pm ET Tuesday, June 15, and lasted all day Wednesday. After its end, Intuit began providing explanations and offers to help those affected.

A statement from CEO Brad Smith, posted on the company's Intuit ProLine Facebook page, said that a severe power failure occurred during routine maintenance and primary and secondary back up systems went down. He also said no foul pay was involved. In other Web site posts, the company promised to help those whose payroll ran into the electronic barrier.

"I also want to share that we have no evidence of a security breach or attack on our servers. And at this time, we do not believe there was any damage or loss to customer data," he said.

Many services were offline for more than 24 hours, although Intuit had started restoring some service late Wednesday evening. However, some major sites, such as www.intuit.com were down until early this morning, Thursday, June 17. Spokesman Rich Walker said the company had put a priority on getting applications up before restoring informational Web sites.

It's the second major outage to hit an accounting software vendor this month. Sage North America had a 22-hour outage on June 1 and 2 that took down major Web sites, corporate email, order entry and Accpaconline.com. Sage attributed its problem to its storage area network, but gave no specifics. While QuickBooks mail was down during the Intuit episode, corporate email was not.

Intuit utilized social media, with status reports posted on Twitter and more lengthy discussion on the company's Intuit ProLine page on Facebook.

Those unable to process direct deposit to create paychecks for Friday, June 18, were instructed to create manual paychecks. Those who make a deposit today were told the employees would not receive the deposits until Monday, June 21. Intuit said it would credit accounts of those chose to use an overnight service for delivery.

The company also said it any businesses were unable to make tax payments,it would work with tax agencies to make sure they would not incur penalties.