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 :) <a href="https://status.xero.com/history" rel="nofollow">https://status.xero.com/history</a> Arguably underreported I might think considering the userbase however
Interesting that their competitor Sage is having almost exactly the same outage, which started at roughly the same time: <a href="https://status.sage.com/" rel="nofollow">https://status.sage.com/</a><p>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!
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.
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 <i>disaster</i> if Xero loses data, but we would pay double or triple to have a monthly data dump a la Slack.
Xero has about 60% of the SME market in Oz.<p>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.<p>Each time I see an outage at Xero, and they are getting more and more lately, my heart stops.<p>I fear one day I’ll wake up and my business won’t work.<p>Still - for SME’s, the alternatives are sparse.<p>I wish they offered offline and backup.<p>I wish they had a competitor with similar pricing and features that offered backup.
Xero is miles away superior to qbo but only because qbo is such an atrocious product.<p>Qbo does seem to have reachable customer service but only does so because their platform is so unreliable and riddled with errors.<p>That being said this is the 1st time i hear of a major xero disruption.<p>There's nothing else out there to compete with either of them unfortunately.
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.
Double take moment, used to work for Xero during uni ~5 years ago in Auckland.<p>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.<p>Fingers crossed they're back up and running soon.
Direct link to issue, but doesn't show affected services:<p><a href="https://status.xero.com/incidents/h2cmcdfcpxgl" rel="nofollow">https://status.xero.com/incidents/h2cmcdfcpxgl</a>