IRS Computer Problems Shut Down Tax Return E-file System (foxnews.com)

Mr.Intel writes: The IRS stopped accepting electronically filed tax returns Wednesday because of problems with some of its computer systems. The outage could affect refunds, but the agency said it doesn't anticipate "major disruptions." A "hardware failure" forced the shutdown of several tax processing systems, including the e-file system, the IRS said in a statement. The IRS.gov website remains available, but "where's my refund" and other services are not working. Some systems will be out of service at least until Thursday, the agency said. "The IRS is currently in the process of making repairs and working to restore normal operations as soon as possible," the IRS said.

Comments

Re:Isn't the R for redundancy?

[MachineShedFred]

I work on a team that writes billing and invoicing software for my company. I can tell you with first hand experience that accountants have no fucking clue how a computer works, other than what they can do in Excel. Because of this, they want to do EVERYTHING in Excel whether it's even remotely the right tool or not.

Example: someone wants to export the general ledger from the billing system to an Excel spreadsheet, and doesn't understand why a two million row data set might be a problem for Excel.

These issues are exactly why "Business Intelligence" tools exist - to provide Excel-ish functions, backed by a real database. But they don't want to hear that, because it means that Excel might actually have limits, and they would have to learn a new tool.

Getting closer to TFA, I'm sure that somewhere in the IRS they have honest-to-goodness network engineers who set this shit up, or at least contractors that they paid to do it. Hardware failures happen in any data center, and you try to mitigate with redundancy and automatic fail-over. But it's never perfect, there's always something that gets missed, or something that doesn't work exactly as expected.