Intuit's Web sites hit by major outage

Intuit's core Web site and its QuickBooks and Quicken online sites have suffered a major outage, rendering them offline and unavailable since 7 p.m. PDT on Tuesday.

In a statement on its QuickBooks support page, Intuit acknowledged the outage but provided no details on the cause or estimated recovery time.

"Service Interruption to Intuit Websites and Applications: Intuit continues working to restore full service to a number of websites and applications that became unavailable at about 7pm Tuesday, Pacific time," read the statement. "Our first priority is to give customers full and complete access to our services and their data as soon as possible. We are also investigating the cause of the problem and will take measures to prevent a recurrence. We appreciate our customers' patience, and apologize for the inconvenience."

A representative from Intuit's corporate communications, Diane Carlini, confirmed to CNET News that the company is aware of the outage, which is preventing customers from connecting to a number of Intuit sites. She said the cause of the outage is unknown at this point but that the company's first priority is to restore the site and make sure customers have access to their data as soon as possible. She added that Intuit is hoping to update its customers as quickly as it can.

The outage has affected Intuit's main Web site, its QuickBooks Online site, and Quicken Online site. Attempts to view any of the sites bring up an error page or a page that says: "This web site is currently unavailable. We are working to restore it as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please check back shortly."

Turbotax, which was also offline, now seems to be back up. Carlini confirmed that things are coming back online as fast as Intuit can get them online again.

Intuit last suffered a significant outage in February 2009 when its QuickBooks site went down for several hours.