By: Vincent Ryan
A NetSuite service outage left some companies without access to their ERP and other systems for as long as seven hours on Tuesday.
Can your finance team do without its accounting or ERP system for up to seven hours? That’s what many Oracle NetSuite customers in the United States (and possibly internationally) experienced on Tuesday.
The NetSuite platform was down for almost a full working day, with customers unable to access the vendor’s cloud-based applications, according to status updates from NetSuite and message board posts from financial professionals.
On downdetector.com, hundreds of issuers reported problems starting early Tuesday morning, with the number of NetSuite problem reports peaking at 178 at 12 p.m. Eastern time. Users reported difficulties with logging in, loading assets, and searching for and entering data.
On Outage.Report, users from the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates posted messages saying the NetSuite platform was inaccessible.
NetSuite posted a message on its status page at 8:15 a.m. saying the problem was an “unplanned” power interruption in its “NA East” data center facility. “The incident is affecting the service for customers local to that data center,” the message said. “Our engineering team is aware of the problem and working on a resolution with the highest priority.”
Then, nearly five hours later (1:09 p.m.), NetSuite posted an incident update, saying the power interruption had been resolved and the vendor was working to restore service. It gave an estimate that complete service would be restored in two hours.
At 2:25 p.m., NetSuite said that service had “been restored to approximately one-third of the customers local to this data center.” The company indicated that the remaining customers would be back up and running within an hour.
While the status updates implied that the the outage was isolated to the East Coast, customers in Houston, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles reported that they were unable to log into the platform.
As of 4:40 p.m., Oracle, which bought NetSuite in 2016, had not responded to a request for comment from CFO.
NetSuite’s Twitter account also contained no status updates or messages about the incident.
NetSuite, founded in 1998, was one of the first “cloud” companies, offering customers financial and resource planning software through a subscription model.