EDIT: It turns out that the irs.gov site wasn’t working for me because of the cookies saved in Safari, not a general incompatibility.
——
I went to pay my taxes yesterday, here, and I get the message
Direct Pay
This Web site is experiencing technical difficulties. Visit Electronic Payment Options for alternative payment methods or come back later and try again.
Note that your tax payment is due regardless of IRS Direct Pay online availability.
I did some searching at Reddit, and, by god, the IRS site was reported down intermittently yesterday (April 14).
But it turns out that this is the message you always get if you use Safari. I paid my taxes using Chrome.
I know that the government has fired anyone with more than a minimal IQ, but whom do I complain to?
Thanks to your comment, Silbey, I figured it out. I had to delete cookies for irs.gov, then it worked. The strange thing is that this is a new computer and I had never visited irs.gov before on this computer. I had a similar problem with Google Sheets. I wonder if Migration Assistant somehow mangles one’s cookies when you transfer from an older OS.
I had the same problem paying estimated taxes yesterday using direct pay, and even this morning my first few attempts to use direct pay had the message about technical difficulties. But it finally went through today.
This is on a fairly new M5 MBA, with yesterday being the first time I used the direct pay site with this machine, so I don’t think it was a cookie issue.
It wasn’t until after I had the verification that I thought of using Firefox from now on - I didn’t consider it might be a Safari issue. I also wonder if the Safari issue is really an iCloud private relay issue? That was my second thought about when I make the next payment in June - to turn off private relay for that site. [It wasn’t private relay - it wasn’t turned on when I checked again.]
I haven’t done any formal tracking of this yet but I’ve noticed over the last few months that more and more websites now misbehave with Safari. I keep multiple browsers on my Mac, with Safari maintained in a minimalist state (only two extensions, 1Password and Downie). Sadly, some sites only work properly for me with Chrome at the moment.
For tax stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if high levels of traffic are affecting the responsiveness of related websites this week.
Probably since most people procrastinate on doing their taxes. I did mine in February. BTW, a bit of trivia: Ever notice that the IRS chose April 15 as the due date which is the same date the Titanic sank?
Well, yes. Those were full months (31 days); the others were hollow months (30 days). But wait, I hear you cry, what about January, August, December, and February? January and February didn’t exist, and August and December had 30 days. Screwy Roman thing, indeed, but I suppose it made sense at the time—especially if you wanted a year with 304 days.
It made sense at the time. It was a (sort of) lunar calendar. And the numbers appealed to the general preference for everything to be in 10’s.
But the year really wasn’t 304 days. The 10 months add up to that, but there were also “winter months” inserted, separate from the calendar, to keep it aligned with the seasons. These dates weren’t formally named or numbered, because they were irrelevant for agriculture.