MYOB Business, AccountRight & Payroll – Weekend Maintenance Lockout: This Has to Change
want to raise something that I suspect many of us in the bookkeeping and accounting community are feeling right now, but may not have had the chance to put into words. MYOB is currently locked down for scheduled maintenance from Friday 8 May at 8:00 PM AEST through to Monday 11 May at 7:00 AM AEST — that's 59 hours. An entire weekend. Gone. But let's put this in context, because this is not a one-off. I pulled our own status history from MYOB's platform and the data speaks for itself. Looking at just the week of 25 April to 1 May 2026: — MYOB Business: affected or under maintenance every single day — AccountRight: affected or under maintenance nearly every day — MYOB Acumatica: maintenance events on multiple days — MYOB Practice Management: degraded or affected every single day — not one clean green day in the entire period — MYOB Exo Payroll: maintenance events mid-week as well This is not occasional planned maintenance. This is chronic, near-daily disruption across MYOB's entire product suite, consistently hitting during evening and overnight hours — from approximately 8:00 PM through to 6:30 AM — week after week. The weekend lockout running until Monday morning is simply the most extreme and visible example of a pattern that has been ongoing for some time and is quietly destroying after-hours productivity for professional practices across the country. For those of us who discovered this weekend's outage only after the system started running strangely and we went looking for answers, that's not good enough. There was no proactive email notification. No direct communication. Just a notice buried on the status page — which places the burden squarely on us to go looking for information we had no reason to expect we'd need. Posting to a status page is not adequate communication for an outage of this scale. And it is certainly not adequate for what the data shows is a near-daily pattern of service degradation. The impact on our practice has been immediate and significant: — We had payroll runs scheduled for multiple clients this weekend, with pay dates on Monday — Our staff work flexible hours, including evenings and weekends — this is our normal — We have lost an entire weekend of billable, deadline-driven work with no access to our clients' data — This work doesn't just disappear — it compresses into an already full week, putting pressure on staff, pushing deadlines, and creating a cascading effect on our scheduling, time management, capacity, and client commitments that will be felt for days — And the cumulative toll of the ongoing weekly overnight outages has been chipping away at our capacity for weeks. Evening work has become so unreliable that we can no longer plan around it with any confidence MYOB's maintenance scheduling appears to be built around the assumption that its users work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. That is not the reality for bookkeepers, BAS agents, and accountants — the very professionals who rely most heavily on this platform and who manage it on behalf of dozens of clients. What I am asking MYOB to address: 1. Proactive email notification for any planned outage longer than a few hours — well in advance, not after the lockout has already begun 2. A transparent explanation of why routine maintenance requires such frequent and lengthy windows across every product in the suite simultaneously 3. A serious review of maintenance scheduling that reflects the actual working patterns of professional practices 4. Acknowledgement that after-hours and weekend access is not optional for our industry — it is essential 5. Consideration of service credits for the cumulative impact of ongoing outages on billable work and client obligations I have screenshots of the status history to back all of this up and am happy to share them. I'd encourage anyone else who has been affected — not just this weekend but by the pattern of ongoing overnight outages — to add their voice here. The more of us who speak up, the harder this is to ignore. Happy to hear if others are experiencing the same and whether anyone has found workable solutions in the meantime.
