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.
