“At this time, the IRS does not anticipate major refund disruptions”, the agency said.

The news that the IRS can now process tax returns may not result in shouts of joy among most Americans, but at least a system outage is better than a hack, with confidential tax information being stolen.

The IRS says it has stopped accepting electronically filed tax returns because of problems with some of its computer systems.

Until the issue is fully resolved, features like “Where’s my refund” are not available on IRS.gov. However, the main website is still working.

The IRS said taxpayers can still file their tax returns and send the forms to e-filing providers while the systems are down.

As of Wednesday evening, the agency was still assessing the scope of the system failure. Apparently, it is still optimistic that in every ten taxpayers, nine of them will be able to receive their refunds within a minimum period of 21 days.

He also said some IRS systems still use the COBOL programming language, which Computer World once described as “a programming dinosaur that was last hot in the 1980s”.

After giving very tough time to tax payers and other users, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is back online.

Taxes are due this year on April 18. The outage is causing problems with the “Where’s My Refund” site, several online tools, payment processing, and the ability to e-file. It also opens the door to the biggest headache of all that millions of Americans face during tax season: hackers stealing their identities and filing false tax returns in their names. And those who had already filed their returns have nothing to worry about and do not have to take any further action because all taxpayers’ data is safe.

Thursday morning, House Oversight and Government Committee Chairman and IRS scourge Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, slammed Koskinen, accusing him of presiding over an agency in shambles.