For anyone who uses Inuit's products, especially QuickBooks, you would have noticed they had a major outage with their online services yesterday.

It first happened around 9am (EST) yesterday morning. I tried to send online invoices and accept some payments but was unable to due to the outage. At first, I received blank pages that said something like please try again.

Then at around 4pm (EST) I was receiving a much nicer error page, asking users to check out the community blog or follow them on Twitter @intuit. So I followed them to keep track of the status. They did several status updates. Including these final two:

We’re beginning to restore all affected websites & services. Customers already have some access; working nonstop until full restoration.less than a minute ago via webIntuit
Intuit

Outage apparently occurred during routine maintenance. Accidental power failure affected both primary and backup systems.less than a minute ago via webIntuit
Intuit

Good, I thought I was done with it. But then this morning at about 3am (EST), Intuit felt they can send me a spam direct message via Twitter to get me to partake in contest to win a small business grant worth $30,000. No thanks! Those types of things you can Tweet to your followers, but do not DM (direct message) us with that.

Intuit Twitter DM Spam

I am following tons of SEOs, many well-known for pushing the spam envelope. But I never get this stuff from them and don't expect it from Intuit.

A DM with an apology for the outage would have been nice. but this, less than 12 hours after the major outage? Common Intuit!