After reading quite a few of the complaints in this thread, I think you are on to something about returns filed before 2/12. As for my story, I filed right on 2/12, late morning, and got a message that they were not yet open for accepting returns yet. I kept trying every couple of hours and they finally reported that I had submitted them at about 3:41 pm. Then I went into "Pending" status and have never emerged from there. (Perhaps they should call it "Purgatory"!:).
This makes me suspect a possible explanation they should look into. What if, to handle customers that wanted to file returns before 2/12, they moved those returns to special temporary servers, while waiting for IRS to open up. There could then be an issue with IRS not pulling from just those "Temporary Pending IRS Opening" servers.
