Xero chief executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy has issued a personal apology to the cloud accounting platform’s customers after five days of disruptions left small businesses, sole traders and accountants in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom unable to reliably log in, raise invoices or process bank feeds during a stretch that ran through the back end of last week and into Monday.
In an email sent to customers late on Monday and confirmed by RNZ, Singh Cassidy said she wanted to reach out personally and on behalf of the entire Xero leadership team to sincerely apologise for the disruptions experienced on the platform over the last five days. She acknowledged that some of the problems had been on Xero’s side and some had been caused by third party platforms the company relies on. For customers with looming filing deadlines, she said the situation was unacceptable.
The apology lands in a particularly sensitive week for the Wellington-founded software company, which is now headquartered in Melbourne and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. Xero is due to release its full year results on Thursday and the platform’s reliability has been a central pillar of the investment case put to shareholders for more than a decade.
Xero says it has more than 4.4 million subscribers worldwide, with more than 500,000 in New Zealand, more than 1.7 million in Australia and more than 900,000 in the United Kingdom. The three markets that bore the brunt of the outage are also the markets that generate the majority of the company’s revenue, which means even a partial disruption running across several days affects a very large share of its paying customers and the accounting practices that build their workflows around the software.
According to BusinessDesk, the outage cycle began roughly a week ago, with users complaining on forums about repeated errors when trying to access dashboards, post journals and reconcile bank feeds. Online discussion in the United Kingdom continued well after Singh Cassidy’s note went out, suggesting that recovery had not been uniform across regions even at the time the apology was published.
The disruption has knock on effects well beyond individual frustrated users. Xero sits at the centre of an ecosystem of payroll providers, payment processors, point of sale systems and Inland Revenue and ATO connections, so an interruption to its platform tends to ripple outward into invoice runs, payday filing, GST returns and bank reconciliations across tens of thousands of small businesses. New Zealand accountants who run their entire client books through Xero have spent the past week fielding calls from worried customers, juggling end of month workflows and watching deadlines slide closer.
Singh Cassidy did not name the third party platforms involved in her note. Industry coverage reported by LiveNews and others has pointed to a hardware fault at Amazon Web Services, where Xero hosts much of its infrastructure, as a contributing factor, although Xero has not formally confirmed the cause. The company has directed customers to its public status page at status.xero.com for the most current view of which services are still showing degraded performance.
The timing puts Singh Cassidy in a delicate spot. She joined Xero from Silicon Valley in 2023 and her tenure has coincided with a broader investor reset on growth software, in which Xero’s share price has fallen by more than half over the past year, dragged down with the rest of the so called ASX tech wreck. Reliability incidents during a deadline period are precisely the kind of reputational hit that can accelerate churn in a market where rival cloud accounting platforms have been investing heavily in feature parity and migration tools.
For the company’s New Zealand base, the question now is what Xero says publicly on Thursday alongside its earnings. Investors will want to see subscriber growth holding up, average revenue per user continuing to climb and a clear technical explanation of what failed last week, along with concrete commitments on resilience spending, redundancy and communication. Customers will want to know whether goodwill credits, fee waivers or filing extensions are on offer for those whose businesses were materially affected.
Inland Revenue has not commented on whether it intends to grant any blanket extension for GST filers caught up in the disruption. Affected businesses that miss a deadline because of the platform outage will need to contact IR directly and request relief on a case by case basis, attaching evidence of the outage timeline from Xero’s status page or screenshots of the errors. Anyone reliant on Xero for payroll over the past week is also advised to double check that wages, PAYE and KiwiSaver contributions reconciled correctly before assuming the system caught up automatically.
In her note, Singh Cassidy said Xero was working hard to determine the root cause of the issues and what the company needed to do to avoid them in future. For the small businesses, contractors and accounting practices that have built their daily workflow around the platform, Thursday’s results call will be the first real test of whether that work is going to translate into something they can rely on through the next month end.
Did the Xero outage hit your business or your clients this past week? Leave a comment below and tell us how you coped with the deadlines.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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