During UK daytime hours on Tuesday 27 July, the Xero platform experienced an outage that affected many of our customers’ ability to log into Xero for several hours. The issue has now been resolved and our service has returned to normal.
Many of our customers and partners have contacted us directly via our customer experience team and social media channels, and our teams internally have been working really hard to respond.
We also wanted to share with you what we know about what happened as we continue our investigations to understand more about the cause.
We acknowledge that this issue was a considerable inconvenience for our customers and had a real impact on your day – so I want to start by saying we are sorry to everyone who was affected.
What happened?
At approximately 8.45am British Summer Time (BST) on Tuesday 27 July, we became aware that Xero users were unable to log into the Xero platform.
The incident was related to our login platform, where a system used to store and trigger events in the login flow was not operating as expected, and so resulted in failures and errors showing for our customers.
As we continued to investigate the issue, we kept customers and our broader community updated via the Xero Status page and proactively through updates to our Twitter and Facebook pages.
Our product teams worked to restore our service in a controlled way. The service resumed at approximately 4.30pm BST on Tuesday 27 July (3.30am NZT Wednesday, 28 July).
I want to assure you that your data and personal information stored on Xero is secure. I know when these things happen, you may worry about the security of your data. I can assure you that this was not a security issue and no data was compromised.
What next?
Ensuring the stability and reliability of the Xero platform for our customers is our highest priority. We are continuing our investigations to understand more about the cause.
Once again, we apologise for the inconvenience this has caused our customers and partners.
Guys it is NOT fully resolved. My login is still broken. As is my colleague. Others have stood back up, but not all.
Hi Jim, sorry to hear that you are still experiencing some issues with your login. Can you please provide us with your email address here so we can get in touch with you directly to give you a hand. Thanks!
This is a major concern. Part of the selection process of our business moving to Xero was the resilience and multi site model. Once investigations are complete I feel that complete transparency is required on this failure.
Thanks for your feedback. We do understand how frustrating this was for you and many of our customers. The stability of our platform is our highest priority. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused you.
You might also publish the fact that you are NOT PREPARED to offer ANY sort of compensation to your customers, which would save MORE wasted time of people easing support cases to ask just that!
It will also help potential customers decide whether to choose Xero over a more reliable and more customer friendly product!
Hi Ian, thanks for getting in touch and sharing your feedback with us. We are truly sorry that you didn’t have a great experience and do appreciate that this was a huge inconvenience for you.
No point in saying sorry without responding to the point about compensation by Ian Bethell.
Please answer will customers get compensation for the loss of productivity?
Hi, we understand your frustrations and the inconvenience the outage caused you and others last week. We do everything we can to avoid disruptions, but if they do occur, we’re unable to provide compensation. If you would like to discuss your feedback further, please contact our support team here. Thanks.
Aziz, “but if they do occur, we’re unable to provide compensation.”
There’s a difference between unable and unwilling, I think you’re mixing the two.
Not really sure you kept customers “proactively updated”. The twitter feed simply said Xero was down and you didn’t know when the issue would be resolved. This didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. Also no mention that this is the 2nd/3rd time this has happened in the past week or so? Signs of a more significant, underlying issue?
Hi Adam, we’re sorry to hear that you didn’t feel adequately informed during Tuesday’s unexpected outage. We updated our social channels and status page as soon as we had relevant information to share. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience.
Hi Rachael
Thanks for posting what you know so far. I think it is important to note that this outage not only impacted my companies ability to manage our financial systems, but our project management systems within Workflow. The result is a days worth of catching up to ensure our projects reflect the work completed.
Perhaps in your review, you might ask the tech wizards to consider a solution that does not bring down your entire ecosystem just because we could not log in to one of your products.
Thanks again for your update and look forward to knowing more about how Xero will mitigate future outages.
Hi Stuart, thanks for getting in touch and we’re sorry for the impact the unexpected outage had on you and your business. The stability of the Xero platform is our highest priority. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused and we thank you for your feedback.
I am a self employed Xero only bookkeeper and lost a day’s wages yesterday due to the fact that I couldn’t work. What compensation is there available for the loss of earnings? Thanks Carolyn
Hi Carolyn, we’re so sorry for the disruption that Tuesday’s unexpected outage caused you. If you’d like to discuss this further, please get in touch by raising a request with our support team here. Thanks!
I am not a “techie”, I am an FD – but yesterday’s outage did inconvenience me considerably, and I would like a bit more detail on exactly, technically what went wrong with the login system please?
Hi Rupert, we’re so sorry for the inconvenience that Tuesday’s unexpected outage caused. We understand how this impacted you and appreciate your feedback.
Your problem is not resolved, I still can’t use your platform!
Hi Fabienne, we’re so sorry to hear that you’re still having some problems. Can you please provide your email address here so we can contact you directly to see what the problem may be? Thanks!