Intuit had reported that the sites were back up at around 5pm Eastern Time.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Intuit (www.intuit.com), an online services company that specializes in business, financial and tax management solutions for businesses, found that sites using its hosting services were inaccessible for several hours on Thursday, according to a company representative.
According to a CNET report, a customer service representative suggested that the outage may have involved a denial-of-service attack, an attempt to make overwhelm a computer resource with requests, making it unavailable to its intended users.
UPDATE: Intuit provided The WHIR the following statement on the disruption: “The recent service interruption to Intuit Website services, Intuit’s platform to host customer websites, has been fully restored. For almost all our affected customers, the outage lasted for around two and a half hours between 12PM-2:30PM Pacific time on Thursday. For a very small group, the trouble lasted through the afternoon and evening.
“This outage was caused by a Denial of Service attack. We worked with the network service providers to contain it at the network level and no customer data was compromised. We are continuing to monitor the situation actively and are fully prepared to defend ourselves against future attacks.”
According to a Twitter post from around 5pm Eastern Time, the company had reported that the sites were back up. The notice read: “Intuit Websites is back up. V sorry for the trouble. We’re continuing to look into the cause to prevent further disruptions today.”
CNET employees, however, attempting to access sites on both the West Coast and East Coast found sites unresponsive as of 6:30pm Eastern.
Some have speculated that the cause of the downtime is related to customer Cooks Source, which has been the subject of a public dispute involving an outside author claiming that their recipe was used in the Cooks Source magazine without permission. Reported in news sources such as The Washington Post, the added traffic driven by interest in the story may have overwhelmed servers.
Intuit outages earlier this year was blamed on power failures, the company told PC World. In July, the company’s QuickBooks site (www.quicken.com), and perhaps even part of its TurboTax service, went down. And in June, a power failure affected the company’s primary and secondary backup systems affecting many of the sites in its network, including Intuit.com, Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax.
In those cases, the company reported no security breach on its systems, and no damage or loss to customer data.
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