Two big tech glitches happened last night:
- The TurboTax servers went down hours before tax returns were due.
- The main servers for BlackBerry email went offline.
According to a spokesperson for TurboTax maker Intuit,
Yesterday was a huge volume day for our back-end electronic filing. As a result, we had a significant slowdown in our ability to process and transmit electronic returns to the IRS.
Luckily for those last-minute filers who got burned, the IRS is going to allow extra time for those people who couldn’t get their returns through the clogged pipes.
As for #2, the BlackBerry servers at Canadian Research in Motion went down overnight, cutting off email to most subscribers in the Western Hemisphere. This was a great quote in the New Zealand Herald:
“I felt like my left arm had been amputated,” said Joe Shoemaker, communications director for Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois.
As for me, I did my taxes in February and I’m not addicted to email on my phone, so I barely noticed.
