The servers hosting Intuit Inc’s web and CD-ROM based TurboTax tax preparation software went down on Monday night, and stayed down for 14 hours. The downtime was attributed to additional backups made at the company – but most commentators believed that peak demand is simply too heavy for the technology to cope with. Another tax site, SecureTax.com, was also reported to have suffered downtime on Tuesday.
US taxpayers have until April 15th to file their returns, and up to 1.2m had been processed through Intuit’s servers by April 5th. Intuit, whose TurboTax site is the most popular by far, had sold 4.1m units of its software by April 8th, with a week of the heaviest usage still to go. The Internal Revenue Service has been encouraging electronic filing as a way to cut down on paperwork and increase the accuracy of the complex form filling.
