The day you’ve been waiting for is finally here. April 17 is Tax Day, America’s favorite holiday, and to celebrate, the Internal Revenue Service experienced an outage. It’s all fixed up now, so congratulations, you can pay your taxes!
Earlier on Tuesday, the website claimed the E-File system was down for scheduled maintenance, with plans to go back up sometime between April 17, 2018, and December 31, 9999.
As Vox points out, it’s likely the E-File outage caused the confusing “scheduled maintenance” error, and it ended up going back up well before its quoted restoration date millennia in the future. The IRS Direct Pay system was also down, so anyone who owed on their taxes was unable to make payments. Again, the system is back up now, so go pay what you owe.
The outage was likely the result of an influx of last-minute tax filings, overwhelming the IRS’ electronic filing system, despite the fact that the IRS sees a massive wave of traffic on Tax Day every year as people scramble to get their taxes in under the deadline.
Reportedly, third party solutions like TurboTax were unaffected, since you can file your taxes through a third party and they’ll just submit them to the IRS’ E-File system when it goes back up.
When we first reported on the outage, the IRS E-File page displayed a simple warning that the system was down.
“The MeF System is down, we are working on this as a priority,” the IRS E-File page warns.
It’s back up now, both the direct pay and E-File systems are fully operational, and it appears the IRS is even extending filing deadlines on account of the unscheduled outage.
“We’ll make sure taxpayers have extensions once the system comes up to make sure they can use it, and it in no way impacts people paying their taxes,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said, according to Bloomberg. “It was just a technical issue we’re working through.”
So, to reiterate, you can now pay your taxes online again and you might even be looking at a bit of an extension. Still, probably get in there and file your taxes before the system goes down again.
Apple has unveiled a new iMac and a 14-inch MacBook Pro, both powered by its new baseline M6 chip. If you’ve been eyeing either device, now is the time to act, as entry-level configurations are becoming harder to get with each product launch.
The devices will be open for pre-order Wednesday, October 28, 2026, from 10:10 AM PT. Meanwhile, deliveries and store stock will arrive on Friday, November 6.
If you make videos, edit photos, or produce music on your Mac, Apple has some good news for you. The company has announced a major update to Apple Creator Studio, packed with new effects and smarter tools. It will arrive on the App Store in November as a free update for existing subscribers.
How does it make video editing easier?
Apple just launched a new entry-level configuration of the 14-inch MacBook Pro.
Even though the design and core hardware are identical, it gets the new M6 processor, which is also debuting in today's iMac refresh.