Xero outage hits small businesses nationally

Businesses across the country have been locked out of cloud accounting software Xero, which was impacted by a global outage for most of the day on Wednesday.

The outage caused chaos for thousands of Australian small businesses and their accounting teams, many of which were left unable to process end-of-month payroll payments or log into their payroll software.

Xero chief executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy last year.Credit: Louie Douvis

Xero is headquartered in Wellington and counts more than 4.2 million customers globally across 180 countries. The incident began about 9.30am AEST, according to outage monitor Down Detector, with more than 1000 users reporting errors on the Down Detector website.

“We’re aware of an issue preventing some customers from logging into Xero,” the company said in a statement.

“This is related to an issue with AWS, a Xero third-party provider. AWS has confirmed it has identified the cause, and is working to rectify.”

Some small business employees told this masthead that their pay cheque would be delayed as a result of the outage.

Xero suffered an outage on Wednesday.Credit: SMH

AWS, also known as Amazon Web Services, is a collection of cloud-computing services that underpin the operations of many businesses. AWS was contacted for comment.

Xero said in an update on Wednesday afternoon that it had resolved the outage.

“Xero’s systems have fully recovered, following an earlier issue which affected some customers. Customers can log in and navigate Xero as expected,” a spokesman said at 3.30pm AEST. “We apologise for the inconvenience caused, and we thank customers for their patience during this time.”

Last year, Xero, which offers entirely cloud-based accounting software for small businesses, shed 15 per cent of its staff – about 800 jobs – amid a broader tech downturn.

Technology outages are becoming more common and more severe. Xero’s issues come just days after nearly 10 million computers were knocked offline by a CrowdStrike problem, which grounded thousands of flights worldwide and felled banks, hospitals and train lines in the worst outage in world history.

CrowdStrike late last week issued its first post-incident report, explaining the outage was caused by a flaw in an update to CrowdStrike Falcon, the company’s software that sits in the background of computers to monitor for cyber threats. CrowdStrike Falcon runs at the kernel level of Windows systems, meaning it has more privileges than most other programs.

But the update was “problematic”, triggering a memory problem that set off Windows’ notorious “blue screen of death”, according to the post-incident report.

Then-home affairs minister Clare O’Neil described the CrowdStrike outage as a “very serious incident for the Australian economy”, and said its effects would likely linger for weeks.

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