I think people are frustrated with TurboTax, even if the issue is ultimately the IRS' fault (which it likely is), because their communication around this has been relatively unclear, contradictory, and confusing - in summary, really poor and disappointing. When a company's primary source of revenue, and their value proposition to us consumers, relies on their superior ability to deliver a convenient tax-related service for a hefty price tag I think most people expect proactive resolution and communication. I don't think I could tell my boss that we should ignore our customers if it was a vendor's problem that was causing our services to not function properly. You better believe we would be proactively working with our vendor to get things resolved ASAP, while at the same time communicating to our customers proactively in order to manage expectations and to prevent wild speculation. Given that TurboTax makes an enormous amount of money charging people for a service that they can complete on their own, I would expect them to be volunteering their own tech resources to help the IRS in this instance.
