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We’re so used to everything online being available all the time that we don’t think about the risks associated with a website being down. Xero experienced a MASSIVE issue relating to the ability for their users to login and use the software on the 27th July 2021. This meant that

• Invoices couldn’t be created
• Pay runs couldn’t be made
• Accounts Receivable staff couldn’t see if customers had paid
• Accounting staff couldn’t use Xero for their work

We all take for granted the benefits of having multiple staff logging in at the same time from different locations as well as automatic backups of our information, but this issue lasted from 8:25AM until 7:04PM – that’s 12 hours!

Xero is transparent about any issues and fixes about their software so you can see exactly what happened that day.

It’s ironic that Xero use the catch phrase “Doing the books online means the work doesn’t stop when you do” to promote their services. Hundreds of thousands of users were disrupted by a failure of one part of their cloud accounting software – the ability to login and one angry user noted that they saw an error message telling them that their password was incorrect rather than a status message to let them know that something was wrong.

A Xero Bookkeeper had to ask on Twitter when the issue was going to be resolved because they were behind in their work. 

 

Other Xero Bookkeepers noted that they are in the business of selling their time and that every hour that they couldn’t work is an hour that they can’t charge for their work.

Small Business owners were also dismayed that they couldn’t perform any of the daily transactions tasks that happen continuously.

These tasks affected the business income as well as payment for products and services and staff wages. These tasks are usually performed by junior level staff and the skills to do this work are included in the Xero Beginners Courses. 

 

We always hear about businesses that want to migrate to Xero from MYOB and QuickBooks Online but when you read more social media comments about the outage some Xero users are quite frustrated. 

Migrating from one accounting program to another is never usually that straight forward but it is so important for a company like Xero to attract users from other accounting programs if they want to keep growing as fast as they have been.

In Australia that usually means getting them to come across from MYOB, in the UK it’s Sage and in the US it’s Intuit QuickBooks. At this time of year Xero use the services of a company called JetConvert to provide a fixed price migration service, even though they have thousands of bookkeepers who could do the job for users. 

 

One of the comments we noticed on Twitter said that they were fed up and seriously considering going the other way. 

 

One of the most serious questions which came from a lot of Xero user was based around compensation for this lost time. Can you imagine how much money that would be? Hundreds of thousands of bookkeeping hours in one day!

In our experience this doesn’t happen very often and the benefits of using cloud-based services like Xero, Google G Suite (our preference over Microsoft Outlook), MYOB Essentials etc far exceeds the risk and costs associated with installing and trouble shooting Windows issues, not having a backup and making everyone come to one central workplace.

If you experienced a disruption using Xero on that day please send me a message and let me know what trouble it caused.

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