“Xero’s systems have fully recovered, following an earlier issue which affected some customers. Customers can log in and navigate Xero as expected,” a spokesman said at 3.30pm AEST. “We apologise for the inconvenience caused, and we thank customers for their patience during this time.”

Last year, Xero, which offers entirely cloud-based accounting software for small businesses, shed 15 per cent of its staff – about 800 jobs – amid a broader tech downturn.

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Technology outages are becoming more common and more severe. Xero’s issues come just days after nearly 10 million computers were knocked offline by a CrowdStrike problem, which grounded thousands of flights worldwide and felled banks, hospitals and train lines in the worst outage in world history.

CrowdStrike late last week issued its first post-incident report, explaining the outage was caused by a flaw in an update to CrowdStrike Falcon, the company’s software that sits in the background of computers to monitor for cyber threats. CrowdStrike Falcon runs at the kernel level of Windows systems, meaning it has more privileges than most other programs.

But the update was “problematic”, triggering a memory problem that set off Windows’ notorious “blue screen of death”, according to the post-incident report.

Then-home affairs minister Clare O’Neil described the CrowdStrike outage as a “very serious incident for the Australian economy”, and said its effects would likely linger for weeks.

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