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Data centreUnited StatesEIR-2303

Power failure during maintenance takes down Intuit data centre systems

June 2010Published 12 Oct 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor

SignificantElectrical
Estimated damageModelled by the register's adjusterHow? Know the real figure?
Figure hidden: shown to subscribersLow confidence
out of service for about •• daysShown in the record →Full estimate
From the recordRoot cause hidden

Companies named in this entry: Intuit

What happened

On the evening of Tuesday 15 June 2010, a power failure at Intuit's data centre in San Diego, California, took down Intuit websites and services, including TurboTax Online, QuickBooks Online, Quicken and QuickenBase. Intuit said the failure occurred during routine maintenance and affected both primary and backup systems. Services returned gradually, and Intuit said it had restored its primary applications and services by the morning of Thursday 17 June. Small business customers who rely on Intuit to process credit card payments and payroll reported being unable to process payments during the outage. As of 17 June the company had not released detailed information about what happened.

Contributing factors

Intuit stated only that a power failure during routine maintenance affected both primary and backup systems. No further detail on the cause was released at the time of reporting.

Lessons learned

  1. Before maintenance on power systems, confirm in writing that backup power and failover paths will remain available if the work goes wrong.
  2. Backup systems that share a point of failure with primary systems during maintenance do not provide resilience; isolate and test them separately.
  3. Customers who depend on a hosted service need communicated recovery timelines and an independent failover plan.

More lessons on outages, backup supply and restoration, electrical protection and isolation, from every incident on the register.

Source

datacenterdynamics.com

Published 2026-10-12. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.

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