
Some H&R Block customers faced hours of outages on Tax Day
CNN
Some H&R Block customers who waited until the last minute to file their taxes faced frustrating outages that began Sunday night, according to the company and Downdetector. The outage was resolved by Monday afternoon, the company’s support account on X said.
Some H&R Block customers who waited until the last day to file their taxes faced frustrating outages that began Sunday night, according to the company and Downdetector. The outage was resolved by Monday afternoon, the tax preparer’s support account posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. Downdetector, which relies on self-submitted reports to track telecommunication and internet disruptions, reported the problems began around 9 pm ET on Sunday. At its peak, there were almost 1,700 outage reports. The outage came at an inconvenient time for taxpayers, as Monday at 11:59 pm is the deadline to file for 2023. The IRS had expected “tens of millions” more returns to be filed in the last few days, and many tax filers rely on online services such as H&R Block. The bad gateway error prevented some desktop software users from filing their returns, H&R Block said on X. Most self-filing customers use the company’s website, which was not affected by the outage. H&R Block advised customers to either file again or print, file and mail the form to the IRS. But that frustrated some customers on social media, who said they rely on e-filing for the convenience over mailing. CNN has reached out to the IRS for an official comment.

Travis Tanner says he first began using ChatGPT less than a year ago for support in his job as an auto mechanic and to communicate with Spanish-speaking coworkers. But these days, he and the artificial intelligence chatbot — which he now refers to as “Lumina” — have very different kinds of conversations, discussing religion, spirituality and the foundation of the universe.