Consumer trying to get a jump on the tax filing and refund ball may have to wait a bit longer, as the Internal Revenue Service suffered a severe computer crash on Wednesday that prevented it from accepting any taxpayer information for several hours. 

Engadget reports that while officials believe the system will be up and running sometime today, the issue could cause a delay for some early filers’ tax returns.

The agency is “still assessing the scope of the outage,” but thinks that any disruptions will be minimal, noting that “nine out of 10 taxpayers will receive their refunds within 21 days.”

The IRS announced Wednesday afternoon that it was experiencing a hardware failure affecting a number of tax processing systems, rendering them unavailable.

“Several of our systems are not currently operating, including our modernized e-file system and a number of other related systems,” the IRS said in a statement. “IRS.gov remains available, although a number of the services on the site are not, including Where’s My Refund.”

The agency said it was working with its e-file software transmitters and the tax community during the outage.

IRS expects its e-file tax system to be back online today [Engadget]

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