Intuit has suffered a lengthy outage with QuickBase, an online database that that is utilized to develop online applications. Also knocked out was the Accountant’s Copy File Transfer Service in the QuickBooks Accountant’s Edition. As indicated by postings on the QuickBase Facebook page, users were complaining the system was unavailable much of Tuesday, July 20, and all of Wednesday, July 21, until service was restored about 9pm ET.
An Intuit Web page gave the following explanation of the likely cause of the problems: "We believe the current outage is a result of connectivity issues between the QuickBase application layer and our back-end storage infrastructure. We have worked with all the vendors responsible for manufacturing the components we use to host our systems to solve this issue."
It's the latest in a chain of outages that have hit a company that prides itself on the percentage of business coming from online applications. For example, the Intui Quickbase Facebook page says 700,000 applications have been developed utilizing the tool.
However, there was a 24-hour incident in early June that knocked out most Web applications and sites. That was attributed to routine maintenance that knocked out primary and secondary back up systems. Last week, Intuit reported that disruption to the commercial power supply triggered a nine-hour outage to most systems.
QuickBase had suffered some problems prior to the latest outage. There was a 10-hour period of degraded performance on Monday, July 19, followed by an outage of slightly more than an hour yesterday, according to an activity report on a QuickBase Web page. Users were complaining about outages as 4 pm yesterday July 20. It was not clear if the complaints reflected the previous outage, which appears to have ended about an hour before the latest episode began.
Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards. Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that. A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind
