Xero needs a hero as business accounting site takes morning off

Online accounting outfit Xero, whose website suggests "reliable data" as a reason for using its wares, took some time out today to the distress of its customers.

First reports of the New Zealand-based company's global outage rolled in during early morning as users in Australia found themselves unable to connect to Xero's online portal:

@Xero your whole system is down, funny that its the same day you forced your 2 FA... launched before ready perhaps? eta on being able to access?

— joshua ballard (@BallardJoshua) September 12, 2018

Xero was quick to update its status page saying at 06:21 UK time that, yes, something was amiss, but the team was working on the issue.

After an initial burst of optimism that the issue had been identified just before 07:00, the support account for Xero settled into a pattern of apologies and assurances.

Sorry John - we understand how frustrating this is for everyone. My team has identified the cause and are working hard to get you back up and running as soon as possible. Please keep an eye on our status page for the latest updates (https://t.co/b18p7E49vq). ^BA

— Xero (@Xero) September 12, 2018

By 11:00, nearly five hours into the outage, the money mangler assured customers that its team was "all-in" on finding a solution. Scant comfort for users unable to deal with invoicing, payroll and all the other things businesses need to do in order to, er, stay in business.

While users amused themselves by posting the usual outage memes, Xero's own Twitter account gave an insight into the atmosphere within the bowels of the financial software flinger:

Thanks for the offer. Only if you can deliver your beer to me via an IV drip 😅 ^TP

— Xero (@Xero) September 12, 2018

Sadly, it was still a few hours before UK customers could similarly enjoy a beer after finally giving up on getting access to their finances, and we're sure users were delighted to see Xero taking the issue so seriously.

The service clambered back online at about 13:35.

A statement to The Register said: "At 6.00am UK time (3.00pm NZ) the Xero site experienced a technical outage which affected access to the Xero site. Our teams are worked with speed [sic] to investigate the issue and site was fully operational at 1.30pm UK time. We sincerely apologise to our customers and community for any disruption this has caused."

The cause of the outage remains unknown. Xero recently began to enforce two-factor authentication in order to beef up security and has insisted that the outage was "in no way related to your data security". ®