channelnews : BREAKING NEWS: Xero Down, AWS Blamed For ...
Thousands of cloud-based Xero customers in Australia have been unable to log in this morning, with the business claiming that the accounting package has been impacted by an Amazon We Service platform issue, users of their system are angry about the lack of communication with some claiming that “payday” for thousands of Australians has been impacted.
The outage comes as Microsoft battles Azure platform issues.
In a message to customers Xero is claiming that they are ‘Aware that customers trying to login or navigate Xero are experiencing errors. Despite claiming that their teams is “investigating with urgency” the system went down several hours ago.
Users are getting a ‘Bad Gateway’ message when they try to log in.
Xero has not said why they are not mirroring their application on multiple servers in an effort to prevent customer interruptions.
Several users of Xero have taken to social media pages complaining about the Companies lack of communication.
One user wrote “Last updated at 1am this morning???? Hardly keeping users informed – 10 hours is a long time not to have access to your whole business system for end of month and wages to be paid”.
“I’ve been watching the updates come in for the past 4-ish hours because I’ve got EoM accounts due and payday for staff today and can’t do either with Xero being out of action”.
Another wrote “I have to move a huge amount of money today with EoM and payday coinciding and it’s almost lunch and I’m still unable to do it. I would’ve expected there to be some backup solutions when using cloud computing at such a large scale”.
The only answer that ChannelNews was able to get from the Company who have not issued a statement to media similar to what Optus were accused of failing to do was that it was an AWS fault.
The Company has also failed to return our calls.
Following a 4.3% decrease in the stock price last week, individual investors suffered the most losses, but institutions who own 33% stock also took a hit with the stock steady today despite the outage.
More to come.
About Post Author
David Richards has been writing about technology for more than 30 years. A former Fleet Street journalist, he wrote the Award Winning Series on the Federated Ships Painters + Dockers Union for the Bulletin that led to a Royal Commission. He is also a Logie Winner for Outstanding Contribution To TV Journalism with a story called The Werribee Affair. In 1997, he built the largest Australian technology media company and prior to that the third largest PR company that became the foundation company for Ogilvy PR. Today he writes about technology and the impact on both business and consumers.
