TurboTax tweets add insult to injury during outage

Rosa Golijan NBC News 1 hr.

Intuit

If you're running a site which guides people through the process of completing their tax returns you should really make sure that it doesn't suffer an outage especially as the deadline to file federal tax returns looms. And if a service outage does happen Well then you might want to cancel any scheduled tweets that discuss the importance of dependence.

Intuit maker of TurboTax learned this lesson the hard way on Sunday evening when the online service associated with the popular tax preparation software became unavailable and customers who consulted the company's official Twitter account for help found only generic tips.

On Sunday TurboTax Online was intermittently unavailable for some customers for about 1 hour from approx. 6 40 p.m to 7 50 p.m. PT a spokesperson for Intuit told NBC News. We resolved the issue and performance was fully restored. There have been no further issues. The site was never totally offline many customers continued to work and complete their returns. However we apologize to those customers that were unable to successfully complete some portion of their tax filing process during that time.

Just as customers were starting to notice that something wasn't right the TurboTax Twitter account posted a message Dependence isn t always great but it is at tax time Aren't you curious to find out why TaxBreaks TurboTaxTip http //tax.sh/Zrx4Ny

You guys should probably stop promoting your service on Twitter right now since you know it s not working TurboTax Fail a Twitter user replied rather quickly.

Awkward. It didn't take long for others to pile on and whoever runs the TurboTax account spent some time writing out apologetic replies.

W e did have some last minute tips scheduled on Twitter to help filers complete their returns the Intuit spokesperson told NBC News. As soon as we realized this we immediately canceled them and focused on helping our customers.

Perhaps next year Intuit will have someone manually tweet during the final days of tax season. Just in case.

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