Authorize.net goes down – one datacenter fire knocks multi-billion dollar business offline
- by Scott Whigham on July 3, 2009 10:38 AMI woke up this morning to lots and lots of error messages from our credit card processing system (over at LearnItFirst, our training video company) due to the fact that Authorize.net, our credit card processor, was offline. Since it was 4:00AM CST, I figured that they were doing maintenance and I thought I'd give them some time. By 6:00AM, they were still not online and they are now in their 8th hour of downtime. I think I was one of the early tweeters about their downtime - when I wrote that they were down, there were just a handful of folks yet awake and getting errors apparently (follow me on twitter). Now twitter is a-twitter and I'm expecting a fail whale anytime soon due to the #authorize tweets!
The famous twitter fail whale
Why does Authorize.net let a single datacenter fire bring their entire enterprise to its knees?
I don't get it - one fire in one facility and the entire company is offline? I mean it - their entire company is offline - web, web services, etc. And this is a holiday weekend in the USA (where the fire was) which means that repair work by contractors may be more difficult and means longer delays.
Where to follow the news
Good links here:
- WebMasterWorld.com: Authorize.net down?
- TechCrunch: Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging
- Twitter: Authorize.net set up a twitter account to provide updates
Good on them for setting up a twitter account. I'm curious to see if they keep it updated...
In the meantime
If you are trying to order SQL Server training videos or SharePoint training videos from LearnItFirst, we are still accepting PayPal orders. You may also telephone your order in as well.
UPDATE: As of 2:00PM CST, Authorize.net is partially up
Over at LearnItFirst.com (makers of great IT training videos), we are now able to do pretty much everything we need to with Authorize.net. We have experienced a few timeout issues but, overall, it seems to be working as before.
I used to build datacenters. It boggles my mind that they wouldn't have geographical redundancy. Was their backup datacenter in the same building???
You are my HERO!!! I have been going crazy trying to contact authorize.net this morning and should have known that the news would roll out on twitter first...Thanks you! will follow
so does this mean a half day at work!
YES...no work for anyone!!
butthole
I have been on this since 8:00 AM Eastern Standard. Transaction processing via direct gateway is back up. Secondary priority is the GLOBAL brand portion of Authorize.NET which will cover the remaining transaction processing.
After this the Merchant Gateway, which should be up by 4PM EDT, and the website, where full details of the fire, and the resulting "perfect storm" will be outlined for all vendors.
If credit card authorization is required in the meantime, you can call your merchant's bureau for telephone orders, and get your authorization codes manually, if need be. Most software will accept a manual code, and many packages offer it as an option (as a pop up windor, or alternative click) when automatic authorizations fail.
Will be first in court! They are not going to bring me down.
I just registered for a class action suite.
http://www.authorizenetlawsuite.com
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