Did anyone lose access to proconnect for about 45 minutes tonight right before the deadline?

[BRVA_PREPARER]

This is September 15, 2020.

[itonewbie]

Plenty of folks lost connection as reported here and in the PTO FB group.  You're not alone but it's back up now.

[sjrcpa]

Lacerte and ProSeries people, too.

[Just-Lisa-Now-]

CCH went down at the same time as well...not sure what happened.

[itonewbie]

Curious...

[BRVA_PREPARER]

When I called ProSeries three days later and asked what happened, the tech said "well it's working now."  I asked how we could be confident it wouldn't happen again on October 15 and his response was "nobody made you wait until the last minute."

ProConnect had no real intelligible response.  

[Just-Lisa-Now-]

Technological issues are why its poor business planning to wait for the last minute....IRS servers could go down at any time as well, you just never know.

[sjrcpa]

"nobody made you wait until the last minute." 

That's not a very nice customer service response.

[BRVA_PREPARER]

CCH contacted the IRS and was instrumental in obtaining relief for two days following the deadline for any returns delinquent because of the failure. 

[itonewbie]

Yes, but that's CCH.  And that's on account of CCH, being the vendor, reaching out to the IRS to ascertain/acknowledge that the problem originated on their end.  Presumably, you can make the same argument about Intuit but dunno how the IRS may receive that in the absence of anything official from Intuit.

Intuit might have heard about CCH and could have seen the various posts here in relation to the alerts from the NSA (yes, NSA as in National Society of Accountants - no, not that NSA) about the IRS' favorable response to CCH but has remained mum thus far.  Ditto whether they will ever pick that up.

[BRVA_PREPARER]

When a k-1 shows up on the due date, there’s not a lot of “business planning” one can do, unless you want to tell your business client to get lost.  With the price that proseries charges, you expect them to be available at critical times or have a good explanation why they weren’t.  Blaming the customer with a lame excuse like that is unacceptable.