Xero is down: what you can do (and what you can't)

If you're reading this while the Xero login page spins: check status.xero.com to confirm it's an outage, stop refreshing, and skip to the "keep trading" list below. The rest of this page is for afterwards, and for making sure the next outage costs you nothing but patience.

I have personal history here. Ziroo exists because Xero went down one afternoon while customers stood at my counter, waiting on paperwork I couldn't reach. Nothing was lost, in the way that a locked room loses nothing. It just stopped being mine for a few hours, at the exact moment I needed it.

First, confirm it's them and not you

Two minutes of triage saves an hour of misdirected panic:

1. Check status.xero.com. Xero's status page reports incidents and maintenance across its products and regions.
2. Try another device or network. If Xero loads on your phone's data but not your office wifi, the problem is closer to home.
3. Check your team. One person locked out is an account problem; everyone locked out is an incident.

If the status page shows an incident, that's your answer. Nobody at your end can fix it, and support can't hurry it. The productive move is to stop watching the spinner and work the problem you can work.

What you can't do (better to know now)

Honesty first, because outage advice that pretends otherwise wastes your time:

• You can't reach anything inside Xero. Invoices, contacts, reports, payroll: all of it is behind the same door. Xero's internal backups don't help you here; they keep Xero recoverable, not reachable.
• You can't expect compensation as a right. Section 38 of Xero's terms makes downtime compensation discretionary, and only for system-wide outages longer than four consecutive hours, and only if you request it in writing within 21 days. Maintenance and third-party failures are excluded. It's a goodwill mechanism, not an SLA.
• You can't retrieve what you never copied. The archive you have during an outage is exactly the one you built before it.

What you can do to keep trading

The business doesn't pause because the software did:

• Take the order anyway. Paper, notes app, whiteboard. Capture what you'd normally type straight into Xero and enter it when the lights come back.
• Issue a temporary invoice if the customer can't wait. A simple document from a Word or Docs template does the job legally; give it a clearly separate numbering series (TMP-001 style) so it can't collide with Xero's sequence, and re-issue or reconcile it in Xero afterwards.
• Raid your sent mail. Every invoice you've ever emailed a customer exists in your sent folder and their inbox. For "can you resend invoice 482?" requests, your email outbox is a surprisingly serviceable archive.
• Use the bank for payment questions. Your banking app shows what's been paid regardless of what Xero can't currently tell you.
• Tell affected customers plainly. "Our accounting platform is down, paperwork will follow this afternoon" costs nothing and reads as competence, not weakness.

The person who shrugs

Every outage thread has one: the business owner who checks the status page, shrugs, and gets on with their day. Their secret is boring. Yesterday's invoices, quotes, and purchase orders are already sitting in their own cloud storage as plain PDFs, readable on any device, no Xero login involved.

That's the position Ziroo puts you in by default: every morning's documents delivered to your inbox and your own Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive before the day starts. When the platform goes down, the archive doesn't notice. An outage becomes a data-entry delay instead of a customer-facing crisis.

Ziroo is in early access. Add me to the waiting list and the next outage finds you with copies.

After the outage

Three tidy-up jobs once the status page turns green:

1. Reconcile the workarounds. Enter the paper orders, replace any temporary invoices with real ones, and retire the TMP numbers.
2. Claim compensation if it qualifies. System-wide, longer than four consecutive hours: put the request to Xero in writing within 21 days. The worst case is a polite no.
3. Fix the thing the outage exposed. If those hours hurt, don't blame Xero's reliability; every platform has incidents. The exposure was that your access to your own records had a single point of failure. The complete backup guide covers every way to remove it.

Outages end. The lesson shouldn't.

Every platform goes down occasionally; that part isn't news and isn't scandal. The only question that matters is what you can reach while it's down. Make the answer "everything up to yesterday" and outages stop being stories you tell.

Add me to the waiting list and start every day with copies in hand.

References to Xero's terms of use are to the Australian edition, last updated 11 February 2025, viewed July 2026. This article is general information. Ziroo is an independent archive service and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Xero Limited.