Unexpected outage – 27 July 2021

During UK daytime hours on Tuesday 27 July, the Xero platform experienced an outage that affected many of our customers’ ability to log into Xero for several hours. The issue has now been resolved and our service has returned to normal.  

Many of our customers and partners have contacted us directly via our customer experience team and social media channels, and our teams internally have been working really hard to respond.

We also wanted to share with you what we know about what happened as we continue our investigations to understand more about the cause.

We acknowledge that this issue was a considerable inconvenience for our customers and had a real impact on your day – so I want to start by saying we are sorry to everyone who was affected. 

What happened?

At approximately 8.45am British Summer Time (BST) on Tuesday 27 July, we became aware that Xero users were unable to log into the Xero platform.

The incident was related to our login platform, where a system used to store and trigger events in the login flow was not operating as expected, and so resulted in failures and errors showing for our customers. 

As we continued to investigate the issue, we kept customers and our broader community updated via the Xero Status page and proactively through updates to our Twitter and Facebook pages. 

Our product teams worked to restore our service in a controlled way. The service resumed at approximately 4.30pm BST on Tuesday 27 July (3.30am NZT Wednesday, 28 July).

I want to assure you that your data and personal information stored on Xero is secure. I know when these things happen, you may worry about the security of your data. I can assure you that this was not a security issue and no data was compromised.

What next?

Ensuring the stability and reliability of the Xero platform for our customers is our highest priority. We are continuing our investigations to understand more about the cause.

Once again, we apologise for the inconvenience this has caused our customers and partners.