Xero outage – Cloud Software service not working for end of month and pay day

As if we haven’t had enough “global outages” to last a lifetime – well, this one won’t be visible to many, but if you’re working for a small business and expecting to be paid tomorrow – brace yourselves as Global Accounting Cloud Software company Xero experiences issues.

Xero is a local company, headquartered in New Zealand with 4.2 million subscribers – they revolutionised small business accounting with a cloud service taking over the mantle from MYOB who were the original small business accounting software go-to.

Today’s issue appears to be at their hosting/server end, as the company say it’s “related to an AWS issue”

It’s quite likely that payroll runs will process as normal despite the outage, but any adjustments or changes to payroll will need to wait for the system to come back online.

Additionally, any accountants, small business owners or bookkeepers looking to square off the books for end of month will have to wait.

There is no currently reported ETA for a restoration of services.

Update: As at just after 10am Sydney time, Xero are still working on a fix with AWS:

As at almost Midday Sydney time, some 4 or more hours since the outage began, Xero is suggesting some users may be getting access, though they offer no certainty on the full restoration:

EFTM can confirm that our access is now working, so likely all services will restore within hours.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have confirmed an issue at their end over recent hours, which appears to confirm what Xero had been stating.

Jul 30 6:00 PM PDT We continue to work on resolving the increased error rates and latencies for Kinesis APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. We wanted to provide you with more details on what is causing the issue. Starting at 2:45 PM PDT, a subsystem within Kinesis began to experience increased contention when processing incoming data. While this had limited impact for most customer workloads, it did cause some internal AWS services – including CloudWatch, ECS Fargate, and API Gateway to experience downstream impact. Engineers have identified the root cause of the issue affecting Kinesis and are working to address the contention. While we are making progress, we expect it to take 2 -3 hours to fully resolve.

Now, That makes little or no sense to me. BUT, it shows that Xero’s issues were out of their hands. And likely other services and companies were also affected.

It all appears to be resolved.