Twitter’s brief morning outage was stressful enough — but those who’ve waited until the last possible moment to pay their tax bills have a much more distressing site crash to worry about: The Internal Revenue Service’s Direct pay site is down the day taxes are due.
It’s been experiencing issues for a number of hours already, and is still unreachable as of this writing. Those who visit the page will be met with a friendly red banner bearing a large exclamation mark and the words “Alert: This service is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
I mean, you didn’t really want to pay your taxes anyway, right?
The site specifically handles pay transfers from checking or savings accounts. There does appear to be a workaround, if you pay with a credit or debit card — though you’ll also be charged a transaction fee. Still, it might be worth the $2 to $4 for the peace of mind.
The IRS says it believes this is all the result of a glitch, rather than something more nefarious like hacking. Perhaps it was even the last-minute strain on the system, though failing on tax days is like giving up a grand slam during game seven of the World Series when you’re an electronic transfer site.
“We are working to resolve the issue and taxpayers should continue to file as they normally would,” acting IRS commissioner David Kautter said in an address today, relayed by The Washington Post. He added that, due to the crash, late payments will “not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”