All signs point to huge growth in the number of e-filers this tax season.
Early indicators are worrisome.
These numbers dwarf the company's approximately 240,000 federal returns filed last tax season on the Web. Much of how Intuit fares under the dramatic increases will depend on how much it learned from several Web outages experienced during the 1998 tax season. At one point last year, the site went down for 30 hours due to maintenance problems. During the weekend of Feb. 12 and 13, additional upgrades were programmed in with no disruption of service. That upgrade, however, included an errant bit of code that resulted in a security glitch that affected 10 users.