2007 Tax Report Highlights

• April 23, 2007 LibertyTax.com experiences serious DNS problems resulting in more than 9 hours of downtime:The problem was first detected by the Chicago monitoring location at 11:44 pm EST on April 22nd and confirmed by all other locations used for this Report. The problem was that the domain name of the website could not be resolved and the website was not accessible from anywhere in the United States. Online visitors and users of the LibertyTax website trying to open any web page saw "This page cannot be displayed" message. At 8:55 am EST on April 23rd, the DNS servers resumed normal operation and the web site was back online. The DNS resoltion problem caused a total website downtime of 9 hours and 10 minutes.
• April 21, 2007 Libertytax.com experiences severe website problems resulting in more than 15 hours of downtime: The San Francisco monitoring location first detected the website problem at 10:22 pm EST on April 20th. The error was confirmed by the additional locations used for this Report and was checked manually by our engineers. The Libertytax home page and all other internal web pages displayed "Server Error in '/' Application" which is equivalent to the "Internal Server Error" message. The website was not functional at all up until 2:00 pm EST on April 21st, when the servers were rebooted and the website was back online. Total downtime of the website for this incident only was reported at 15h 38m. Since the end of the Report period is approaching, this incident will put Libertytax.com as the worst performer in the uptime measurements.
• April 19, 2007 The Report period extended until April 26, 2007: After further assessment of conditions across the region affected by the April 16 storm, the IRS has decided to allow affected taxpayers an additional seven days to fulfill their tax filing obligations. We are extending the monitoring of all websites covered for the 2007 Tax Report until midnight April 26 also.
• April 17, 2007 The Report period extended until April 19, 2007: As a result of the storm that hit the Northeast, the IRS decided to extend the filing period for those affected until midnight April 19 to meet their tax filing obligations without incurring late filing and payment penalties. We are extending the monitoring of all websites covered for the 2007 Tax Report until midnight April 19 also.
• April 17, 2007 Libertytax.com website unavailable for almost 2 hours during the busiest day of 2007 Tax season: Last minute e-filers who chose Libertytax.com to file their tax returns were unable to do so between 7:30 and 9:20 pm EST. At 7:31pm EST our San Francisco monitoring location detected that the website was not functional at all, displaying "500 Internal Server Error" message at the home page, which was also confirmed by the other locations monitoring the website. The error was fixed at 9:18pm EST and the website resumed normal operation.
• April 10, 2007 Esmarttax.com website experience downtime for 30 minutes: Another website went down for 30 minutes in the afternoon. All 3 monitoring locations detected the error at 4:30pm EST, our forced monitoring at 3 minute monitoring interval went into action and detected a full recovery of the website at 5pm EST.
• April 10, 2007 Taxslayer.com website experience downtime for 2 hours: The first confirmation that the Taxslayer.com secure website is down came right after 6am EST. Initially the secure page displayed "500 internal server error", and later a message "System Maintenance We apologize, but we are performing routine system maintenance at the moment. Please try your request again later." was displayed. The website came back online at 8am EST and was fully functional servicing online customer requests and transactions. Later on during the day, at 10:20am EST we again detected the same error with the secure website which was fixed 10 minutes later.
• April 5, 2007 Report Update: This year we have added two more tax related websites offering also e-filing services and authorized by the IRS for e-file. This makes the total number of monitored websites and their related web transactions to fourteen. The additional websites are www.olt.com and www.libertytax.com. In 2006, we monitored twelve websites for the purpose of the Websitepulse 2006 Tax Performance & Uptime Report.