Turbo tax errors – turbo tax online temporarily unavailable
“Unavailable” should be the last thing which I would like to see on some web page of a established company’s website.
There are many companies like
which develops tax software in United States and this being the start of the tax season I don’t expect their service to go down.
Today I was looking at online turbo tax (I am perfectly okay doing tax online vs doing it on my desktop. What the heck, whole (almost) life is online !!!!) and got a very disturbing “unavailable” response. Here is the image
This is the time everyone is evaluating/subscribing/downloading your software and in this economy losing customers will be painful. But one person will definitely agree with me i.e. Timothy Geithner and will say “better be unavailable then messing my tax returns (like the way it happened with Timothy Geithner but who cares he is a Treasury Secretary now)
But seriously this is again a good lesson for companies who wants to sell their product fast. It would be better to have automated testing framework set up testing their web applications. Hire more QA people and test and retest before releasing the final product. You can’t take chance with critical application like this.
Update 1: It seems turbotax is broken again and many of it’s customers are having hard time. I am presuming that the fix which Bob mentioned below didn’t work for them.
Update 2: I have emailed to Bob Meighan (VP – Turbo Tax) at Intuit to see when this saga will be over. As soon as I get a reply I will post it here.
Update 3: I have received this email from Bob and he told me that service is up and running…
from Meighan, Bob <Bob_Meighan@intuit.com>
to Dipesh Khakhkhar <dipeshkhakhkhar@gmail.com>
date Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 10:07 PM
subject RE: Turbo tax errors – turbo tax online temporarily unavailable
mailed-by intuit.com
signed-by intuit.com
Reply
Dipesh…We’re still investigating root cause, but the service is up and running.
Below is my most recent post to the Live Community on the TT website. Granted, it is now 2010, but it appears that TT support is still suffering from technical confusion and general brain freeze:
…MS determined that TT Online is ** not ** compatible with Win 7 with IE8…others should be made aware of ongoing problems around Win 7 and IE8 (should you consider switching to the online ver).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/dd441788.asp
When I attempted to use TT Online 2009, the application would constantly hang when “updating”. My progress shows up as 16%, but the minute I try to click on a tab, the updating starts. I have found NO solutions on the TT website (tried numerous, so-called fixes). You can search on “update” or “hang” in the TT live community and see what I am talking about.
Furthermore, a chat tech confirmed this incompatibility this weekend (1/4/2010) when I reported the problem. So I disabled IE8 and installed Firefox. Now everything is working, but I am wondering if I want to give Intuit anymore money.
I spoke with the same support team (in Tucson) this morning and they absolutely DENY that there is any problem with IE8 and Windows7 when using TT Online 2009. Their system requirements state that Win7 and IE8 are compatible. They claim that the MSDN article (above) applies only to TT Online 2008. I don’t believe this — their staff is apparently confused and covering their a****. They were belligerent, at best. At this point in time, I believe that MS knows more about this than they do.
Just read through some of “update” and “hang” posts for Win7 and IE8 on the TT Live Community. TT has fallen over and can’t get it.