Downtime all over the place (Denny's, Vizio, and QuickBooks)

The Super Bowl led to Dennys.com and Vizio.com falling down, while QuickBooks went offline for a number of hours. Denny's and Vizio we can live with, but QuickBooks is a different story. According to the CNet report:

Affected customers of Quickbooks Online were left without access to their financial records. While users of the software version of Quickbooks could access their records, those relying on Intuit for credit-card processing had to do authorizations manually over the phone--a slower, more expensive process.

All online services have outages from time to time, but this one appears to have been lengthy for a line-of-business service, and for many users, unsatisfactorily managed. We received complaints from users that communications from Intuit gave neither a reason for the outages nor an estimate on when the service would return.

Hopefully a lesson learned here. Watching the Twitter traffic at that time, I was impressed to see some signs of life.

Update: Jack in the Box had it's fair share of problems as well.