TurboTax Runs Out of Gas

Posted on April 18, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0 |

"Intuit is working with the IRS and has notified them that throughput on our electronic filing system was not what we expected, resulting in a system slowdown," the company said in a note on its Web site. "We encourage customers to continue trying to e-file as we continue to work on the issue."

Quite honestly, it’s hard to imagine the challenges that Intuit has in running a service that is the epitome of mission critical yet does almost all of their business in one quarter. It’s like the mother of all Christmas rushes. Considering that the service failed under heavy loads yesterday, it would appear that they didn’t handle the challenge as well as their customers would expect.

Why doesn’t Intuit have the equivalent of Amazon’s EC2 to buffer unanticipated demand? Surely the cost of paying premium datacenter rent for EC2 would be worthwhile considering the alternative, a service that fails under heavy load that then creates a "federal case" quite literally when the company has to arrange an amnesty period with the IRS to avoid causing their customers real financial damage.

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