QuickBooks Online apologies
I apologize for the effect that the service outage had on you and your business. We know our customers rely on QuickBooks Online and we take it very seriously when your business is unable to perform its key tasks.
Your business success and the availability of our service is one of our top priorities. We have an entire team of folks investigating this incident and are committed to improving our service’s availability.
My sincere apology,
Suchi Upadhyayula
suchi_upadhyayula@intuit.com
Director of Product Development, QuickBooks Online
June 17, 2010 at 3:00 pm
I understand that the service failure was unintentional – just as the BP oil spill was unintentional. Yet, BP was required to “pay” for causing losses to the businesses they affected. Has Intuit thought of a way to “pay” us for the money invested in time/salaries for people sitting around the office? Either that, or giving us free “seats” for licensing as consolation?
Point is, Intuit is a strong company and very capable of doing more than a simple “I’m sorry”. I wish we could say “I’m sorry” to all the customers that were affected by the failure of your server, but we can’t. We’re just out of the business and out of the money for salaries/wages for the day and a half. Maybe if there were more companies like BP that were willing to step up to the plate and financially feel responsible for an error on THEIR part that might have causes financial distress to the environment/clients that relied on them, then I would feel a lot better than just reading a BP letter.
I just feel slighted, to a certain degree. As if you guys are using “I’m sorry” as a way to dodge the bullet. I know you’re sorry, and I don’t blame you for putting that letter out – but at least send your clients SOMETHING other than an apology letter…
Thank you for your time. I hope the failure never happens again, but we definitely learned that we rely heavily on Intuit – to the point where it’s kinda scary…and now we’re having meetings to determine whether or not our reliance is as necessary as it has been…
June 17, 2010 at 4:14 pm
I agree 100%. We all paid for a service that we did not receive and I think some sort of compensation would be a show of good faith.
June 18, 2010 at 9:26 am
The sentiment and rationale expressed here is spot on with how I, as CEO of my creative firm, and my team feel about the outage situation. How are we held financially responsible for employees sitting about, not getting work done with fault clearly on the Intuit system being down. The disconnect is clear to me. Taking responsibility is a HUGE step, I agree, but not even a token “free month”? I’d love to be able to send Intuit an invoice for the hours my staff did nothing, yet I still had to pay them. Being proactive rather than reactive, I’m looking at other solutions since this has happened before. Any suggestions?
All the best.
June 17, 2010 at 6:10 pm
I agree SEM Exposure and Mike Ecklund. I sent Suchi Upadhyayula an email with exactly that message yesterday.
No response.
June 17, 2010 at 9:43 pm
I only recently moved to QB online and my small business has been devastated by the downtime – statements didn’t go out, customers didn’t get paid! I think a years free subscription service would be fair as a form of compensation for QB customers — that is, if we decide to continue with QB!!
June 18, 2010 at 6:56 am
This is not the first time we have had downtime and each time it has been impossible to speak to a live person at Quickbooks. Each phone number that was provided led to an automated we’re sorry message with no chance for us to voice our frustrations. When we were able to get back on line we received a no reply email notification – what cowards! We’ll definitely look for another provider.
June 18, 2010 at 7:46 am
John Duran is absolutely correct. This isn’t the first time we’ve been down and out. When that happens, I get hit with both barrels. As an accountant,I have numerous companies Online and when this outage happens, they all call me, frustrated because they can’t access their data or conduct their day to day business. According to my clients it is my fault and my problem since I set them up with Online in the first place. They expect me to compensate them for the problems caused by the outage but I have never once been compensated in any way by Intuit for the losses incurred. One of these times, my clients will just get fed up with it and then I’ll lose the clients because of Intuit. How do you think I’ll get compensated for that?
June 18, 2010 at 7:48 am
This was a serious outage and it impacted our business, and it shows the weakness of relying on an online service to house your most critical information. I’m not calling for a freebie. I want to know how I can ABSOLUTELY get access to my company information when this happens the next time. And it will happen…
What mechanism will intuit put in place to ensure that I have synchronized copy of my data AT MY LOCATION that can be used by a physical copy of quickbooks at my location?
Really. What good will a free license or a couple months waived service do for you when this happens the NEXT time? What if the NEXT time it lasts longer and corrupts your data? Do you have a copy of all your data?
June 18, 2010 at 9:34 am
We did not have service from you for three days. You should NOT charge us for those 3 days and that is getting off light.
June 18, 2010 at 9:58 am
Agree with all of the above. Unacceptable. It’s not the mistakes you make, but how you correct them. “I’m sorry”, while nice, is not enough to make up for damages suffered. At the very “least” we should not have to pay for a service we didn’t recieve. Even the big bad cable companies will pro-rate if your cable is out.
June 20, 2010 at 9:10 pm
After the product manager put up the first round of apologies, I sent over the following note:
To all of you at QuickBooks Online:
You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
We have been with this product for more than 4 years, and it has always been obvious that you treated QBOE as a poor stepchild to the desktop version. I only expected that you were running this product on a redundant basis across multiple data centers. What is super clear, based upon our experience for the last 3 days, is that you were NOT running this across multiple data centers, and it is all in one data center that went down.
And this is the way you run your business?
And this is the way you have placed key data for my business at risk?
I am going to start hunting for a new solution immediately. You are selfish and reckless with the core data I entrusted to you to run my business, and you have destroyed our ability to place trust in you.
Update…I have not gotten any sort of reply. We pay over 1,200 writers on a monthly basis, and this caused major disruptions to our business. The more important issue they have NOT addressed is that it is quite clear that if there is a power failure in a single location and that takes the system down, there is no redundancy across at least one data center in a separate geographic location. If you do NOT have this feature, than they have been playing fast and loose with the key data that we run our business with, and there is no second copy. Very poor response to the crisis they have caused all of us.
June 21, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Dear Suchi:
I have been with QB for 15 years, first as desktop user and then QB Online. We added a total of four companies and I am disappointed with this outage and of earlier similar outages. We are a vocational training college and without data, we were so helpless and during this period lost over $100,000 in cash collections and now this month we will be off our target. Even though we will be able to recover it eventually but loss of cash flow now is devastating. Four years ago, we were dumped by your payroll service as you folks conveniently got out of Complete payroll business and now we have to repeat the entire payroll from the third party provider to QB online again and it is very slow to respond. Also over a period of time, the service has become very slow and have in the past few years talking to number of tech’s who could not tell me the reason why, they said they might have to move us to a different cluster (we don’t know this lingo), finally only in October last year; one tech told me that we have outgrown this service as QB online cannot handle our large data file. We told them to suggest us something in the hosted environment, but different sales reps since Nov have left the ball several times. I am seriously considering Microsoft Great Plains, they are offering three licenses for $1 promotion, only from second year we pay maintenance, and their system seems more robust. You have to give me a serious reason why our four companies should continue to be users of QB and if there is a compelling reason, how QB Enterprise Desktop version will match against MS GP accounting software which can integrate with whole host of vendors for payroll/banking/CRM etc?
Sam Hiranandaney, President
July 14, 2010 at 10:43 am
So much for sorry. The site is down again. Just went down 5 minutes ago.
This is rediculous!
July 14, 2010 at 11:01 am
Your entire site, including your main site, is down again. It is time to admit that your service is not up to the availability level that an accounting package should maintain. Please tell me what plans you have, if any, to get to that point. I would like to make an informed decision on when and if I switch from quickbooks online.
July 15, 2010 at 8:32 am
I AM PRETTY SURE THAT QUICKBOOKS/INTUIT IS A TERRORIST ATTACH IN THE MAKING. PLEASE PLEASE STOP USING THERE PRODUCTS. ALSO, IF YOU HAVE A NETGEAR ROUTER GET RID OF THAT AS WELL. THEY ARE THE SAME PEOPLE WORKING TOGETHER. DOES ANYONE AGREE WITH ME ON THIS. THEY ARE CONTROLLING OUR COUNTRIES TECHNOLOGY AND OUR MONEY. I AM AFRAID OF WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO OUR COUNTRY THIS TIME WHEN THEY SUCCEED WITH WHAT IT IS THAT THEY ARE WORKING ON.
July 15, 2010 at 8:32 am
TYPO: ATTACK
July 15, 2010 at 8:37 am
and don’t forget tin foil Keith. They’re going to use that to create mind control hats for us. STOP BUYING TIN FOIL!
August 15, 2010 at 7:54 am
I too am not satisfied with the online version of QB. I have much more freedom (within QB) using my desktop version than the online version. My accountant feels the same way about QB. I have long item codes that I need to see (as well as my customers)but to my knowledge QBO does not offer any adjustments. I sit here debating about calling my accountant and “Paying” her to switch me back to desktop version. I was hoping for so much more when switching to the QBO but met with disappointment!