Xero plagued by systems issues at worst possible time of month for customers

Xero is experiencing major systems issues coinciding with end of month invoicing, creating disruption for customers worldwide.

An update on the company's status page says that users began reporting errors and slowness whilst using the Xero platform at around 2:24 am NZT this morning (1st October).

"We understand this is disrupting your day and we are sorry. Please bear with us as our teams work to investigate and solve this," one of the updates says.

As of 10:00 am NZT this morning, the company had identified the issue and was working on a fix for the issue, which started at around 3:00 am NZT.

Customers have taken to Twitter to express their frustrations, with some threatening to move to another platform. One user posted, "Im cancelling now moving elsewhere had enough of this." The same user also posted, I can't pay staff. I can't pay suppliers. Your system is too unreliable this has happened too many times now.

Another user posted, "Payroll all set up to go, and now I can't access it. Explain that to our employees who are waiting for their salary and payslips.

The frustrations also point to some other significant customer service issues, particularly after subscription prices recently increased.

A Twitter user said, "Xero: the company that sends endless survey requests of its users, never makes substantive changes, has an outage lasting hours but calls it minutes, and who has lost their UI/UX edge. Can't wait to leave for another platform.

Another posted, "Month end? Not only the worst time for your customers, but it is starting to seem that your services just doesn't scale to handle peak traffic. Let's hope my client accepts "sorry, Xero was down again" as a reason for my late invoice, because I'm really not impressed.

The platform has been plagued by separate issues over the last several days.

The trouble began at around 11:30 am NZT on Monday when customers using Apple's Safari browser could not access specific pages in Xero Practice Manager and Workflow Max. The issue took several hours to resolve and was back online by 7:00 pm

But that wasn't the last of Xero's worries. At 2:15 pm NZT on Monday, users were unable to run a trial balance report in Xero. This issue was later fixed by 4:00 pm on the same day.

At around 3:45 pm NZT on Monday, another round of slowness and errors cropped up. This issue plagued the company for more than 13 hours, but it was eventually resolved by 5:00 am NZT on Tuesday.

At around 10:00 pm NZT on Monday, users started reporting slowness and errors in Hubdoc. The issue was resolved a few hours later.

At 1:30 pm NZT on Thursday, Xero Tax AU users reported issues with opening tax returns. The issue was resolved shortly afterwards.