Intuit Web sites come back online

Intuit's several Web sites, including Quicken Online and QuickBooks Online, are back online following a major power outage that took the sites down Tuesday evening.

In a statement released Thursday morning, Intuit said that after working throughout the night on Wednesday it had restored service to the customer sites that were down since 7 p.m. PDT Tuesday as a result of the outage. Those sites include Intuit's core Web site, QuickBooks Online, Quicken, QuickBase, and TurboTax Online. Intuit advises that in some cases customers may need to refresh their browsers to reconnect to the affected sites and services.

Intuit explained that the outage occurred during routine maintenance Tuesday night when an accidental power failure affected its primary and backup systems, taking down a number of its Web sites and services.

In a letter addressed to customers, Intuit CEO Brad Smith apologized for the outage and admitted that the company failed to live up to its expectations of dependability and customer service. However, Smith said the company has found no evidence of a security breach or attack on its servers.

At this point, Intuit said it's keeping an eye on sites that were offline and will work with customers affected by the outage.

"We're carefully monitoring the sites and the applications that support them to ensure we provide the services that customers expect. And they're performing well at this time," Ginny Lee, Intuit chief information officer, said in a statement. "We're deeply sorry for the disruption to businesses and consumers and appreciate their patience as we worked to resolve this problem. With service restored, it's our priority to work with those affected and resolve any issues caused by this outage."

Intuit spokesperson Diane Carlini said that Intuit is conducting an investigation, and once that's complete, the company will determine what to do to prevent this from happening again.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. PDT with a link to Smith's letter.