It’s the great untold dirty secret of SaaS (News - Alert) – you’re not in control of your application’s uptime.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Intuit (News - Alert) officials were “trying to restore service to company websites affected by an outage that began Tuesday night.”

Consumers and small businesses were left without access to online versions of the company's accounting and tax software, the Journal adds, noting that “Intuit's products include TurboTax, Quicken and the QuickBooks accounting program used by many small businesses. The online services associated with those products remained offline Wednesday afternoon.”

Would this be a problem? Oh yes. The Journal reproduced some of the comments left on the Intuit online support forum: "Listen, if I am not able to process my credit cards before noon tomorrow, checks are going to bounce in my account." "I cannot write checks of any type."

And those are just the ones using language fit for a family publication. Overall the sites were down for about 24 hours, and many of those affected witched and complained on Twitter, which is kind of ironic, as Twitter’s become notorious for Fail Whales itself.

The issue seems to be resolved: “Users trying to access Intuit's small-business software online were finally in luck today,” wrote industry observer Sharon Gaudin at 4:45 Thursday afternoon, adding that Intuit officials said its various Web sites, including TurboTax Online and QuickBooks Online, “were restored after being brought down in a site outage Tuesday night.”

The company said the outage was caused by a power failure that affected Intuit's primary and backup systems during routine maintenance, Gaudin wrote, knocking "a number of Intuit's Web sites and services offline.”

An Intuit spokeswoman had earlier told the Journal that while they hadn't identified the cause of the outage, they were sure it wasn’t a cyber attack. Some Intuit websites were beginning to come back online late Wednesday afternoon, she added.