from Hacker News

All Xero services facing major outage

by J_tt on 7/27/21, 9:55 AM with 26 comments

• by spondyl on 7/27/21, 11:08 AM

  As an ex-Xero employee, I just had to blink twice seeing this trending on Hacker News. For context, Xero is primarily huge in New Zealand and Australia with a large UK chunk but not much presence in the US. While I shouldn't say too much, I'm sure the incident history speaks for itself that this isn't unheard of :) https://status.xero.com/history Arguably underreported I might think considering the userbase however

• by shrikant on 7/27/21, 10:50 AM

  Interesting that their competitor Sage is having almost exactly the same outage, which started at roughly the same time: https://status.sage.com/

  Although, I prefer Xero's status update to Sage's at this point: I don't think it's appropriate to claim all your other services are "operational" if you can't log in to any of them!

• by NZ_Matt on 7/27/21, 11:28 AM

  3 hours down so far and no notification on the login page, no explanation in the status to say they have diagnosed the issue and no eta for a fix is very very poor for a service of this type. Particularly annoying as I have an invoice to create.

• by petercooper on 7/27/21, 11:19 AM

  We use Xero for all of our accounting but what has always shocked/surprised me is that their backup/export facilities are so poor. We have all the source data so it's not a disaster if Xero loses data, but we would pay double or triple to have a monthly data dump a la Slack.

• by the-dude on 7/27/21, 10:57 AM

  Apparently, Xero is an online accouting SaaS. Never heard of it before.

• by sydneycatalyst on 7/27/21, 12:08 PM

  Xero has about 60% of the SME market in Oz.

  Xero doesn’t let you export or backup your data. One Kiwi company does auto Xero backup (Control-C) but their interface is super clunky - I know they are trying to fix their stuff though but the backup service provided is for use in emergency only.

  Each time I see an outage at Xero, and they are getting more and more lately, my heart stops.

  I fear one day I’ll wake up and my business won’t work.

  Still - for SME’s, the alternatives are sparse.

  I wish they offered offline and backup.

  I wish they had a competitor with similar pricing and features that offered backup.

• by IG_Semmelweiss on 7/27/21, 12:26 PM

  Xero is miles away superior to qbo but only because qbo is such an atrocious product.

  Qbo does seem to have reachable customer service but only does so because their platform is so unreliable and riddled with errors.

  That being said this is the 1st time i hear of a major xero disruption.

  There's nothing else out there to compete with either of them unfortunately.

• by AckermanMD on 7/27/21, 2:41 PM

  I was an early adopter in the US. I've been relying on Xero and it's APIs for my business to operate since 2009! This is the first time I can ever remember an outage like this. There are definitely some things that annoy me about the product, but I understand that when you deal with a companies general ledger, you can't afford to "Move Fast and Break Things." I do not envy the sysadmins getting woken from their sleep right now.

• by alexh1 on 7/27/21, 1:45 PM

  Double take moment, used to work for Xero during uni ~5 years ago in Auckland.

  Great people and company to work for, since then they've continued to grow massively and everyone I worked with then is now team/country/region lead.

  Fingers crossed they're back up and running soon.

• by J_tt on 7/27/21, 9:57 AM

  Direct link to issue, but doesn't show affected services:

  https://status.xero.com/incidents/h2cmcdfcpxgl