On the other hand, Intuit said a software outdate cause an outage that started on September 18 through 21 this year and affected several systems.  A two-hour outage in October 2010 took down the credit card processing services. In June 2010, an outage that lasted more than 24 hours knocked out most online systems, including merchant services, online payroll, Web Sites (the former Homestead), Quicken and QuickBooks email. Again the impact on the power supply was an issue. That stemmed from a worker performing routine maintenance who hard booted down the system and turned it back on without following the proper sequence. And the backup system didn't work because battery failover system had been switched to manual, instead of automated" performance. After the June 2010 episode, Smith labeled the cause a "comedy of errors", all human. The thing that keeps gnawing at me is that Intuit spent more than $200 million for a new data center, a 240,000 sq. ft. facility that opened in August 2009 in Quincy Wash. You'd think you'd get more for $200M. Trolling through a Google search for entries about the data center, I found a reference to the migration of QuickBase to the Quincy facility in June 2010, right after the outage. When an employee posted a comment that QuickBase was going to be unavailable for eight hours during that process, it drew an incredulous response from someone who replied that most major corporations manage to have systems up 24/7 (hint, I would think banking would be one that would be up at all costs.) A problem from routine maintenance and another from a software update sound like the planning process has some flaws and I just have trouble understanding how a well-designed operation can have a short that knocks out three power systems.