The Internal Revenue Service stopped accepting electronically filed tax returns after it suffered a "hardware failure" Wednesday afternoon, an outage the agency said wasn't expected to cause "major disruptions," but could affect refunds. "The IRS is still assessing the scope of the outage," said the agency, according to USA Today. "At this time, the IRS does not anticipate major refund disruptions; we continue to expect that nine out of 10 taxpayers will receive their refunds within 21 days."
Reporting the issue, the federal agency said that a "hardware failure" forced the shutdown Wednesday. "The IRS is currently in the process of making repairs and working to restore normal operations as soon as possible," said the IRS.
At the time, the IRS.gov website was available, but "where's my refund" and other services weren't, reported the Associated Press. In light of this, taxpayers were encouraged to send electronic returns to a third-party processor like TurboTax or another retail tax outlet. However, those companies would be forced to hold on to the tax returns until the IRS systems came back online.
The IRS noted that anyone who already filed their taxes were not affected by the power outage.
This wasn't the first time IRS faced computer-related problems, reported Newsmax. A group of hackers infiltrated the IRS security systems, gaining access to the information of about 104,000 taxpayers, in May 2015. "We're confident that these are not amateurs but organized crime syndicates that not only we, but others in the financial industry are dealing with," said Commissioner John Koskinen at the time.
