DISQUS

VentureBeat: Fire takes down Authorize.net, halting e-commerce for many

  • Peter Antypas · 5 months ago
    If they really had a "fully redundant data center" this would never even have been newsworthy. The fact that they had a SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE (all servers in one colo), completely invalidates their PR. "Fully redundant" means I can lose half my capacity and nobody will fucking notice.
  • slivingstone · 5 months ago
    Authorize.net seems to have also lost their ability to notify their customers about this problem. On a day when a lot of people are leaving town for the holiday weekend, a heads-up would have been nice. My office is closed today, so I had no clue what was happening until I checked in on my website at 10:00 A.M.

    There's no excuse for this kind of system failure. I assumed a company such as Authorize.net would have a backup in place in the event of a fire, natural disaster, etc.
  • damarisR · 5 months ago
    This is excatly why i recommend to all my clients to use Network Merchants instead, ww.nmi.com
    they have back-ups in NY, LA and Chicago.
    if you are looking for better, cheeper service with back-up contact me at damaris@aballc.com
    there is no excuse to cut corners....

    Damaris
  • HutMaster Keaka in Hawaii · 5 months ago
    We, www.SIPhawaii.com noticed slow downloading of webpages which have the Authorize.Net verification seal. The seal did not show when Authorize.Net was down and that caused a delay in showing the webpages. Now the ANET seal is showing again, but clicking on it to verify is still very slow or does not work yet. Still not sure if the ANET credit card verification for both US and Global transactions is properly functioning. Lucky we have Google and Paypal Checkout as well! Now let's wait and see if the USPS online ship and click label system will not crash again for days during the Xmas holidiays due to overloading.... Or our hosting company does not start a half a day maintenance session the day before Black Friday.... Never a dull moment being a webmaster.... The weather here is great though....so is our coffee...
  • Gadget Sleuth · 5 months ago
    No excuse for this from a million dollar company. Glad I left AuthNet awhile back.
  • Rich · 5 months ago
    It's also affecting physical stores. A local Apple shop I was at this morning could not take plastic. My wife encountered this too. The guy at the Mac shop said that Authorize.net had one of its data centers taken out by flooding a few weeks ago. Now this.
  • Anthony Ha · 5 months ago
    Whaaat? Wow, I didn't realize that.
  • seo_expert · 5 months ago
    I work in search engine marketing, and we spent most of the day pausing our client's campaigns to limit their financial exposure. Many pay a thousand or more dollars daily on paid search ads - which is money burned if their site can not authorize a card payment.
  • angela · 5 months ago
    We lost at least $20,000 today because of this outage. No contact whatsoever. Totally unprofessional. My husband is a Network engineer for an insurance company and he sets up redundant systems. This should have kicked over immediately somewhere else. This is unacceptable. I'm shopping for a new credit card processing company.
  • Anthony Ha · 5 months ago
    I suspect you're not alone in looking to switch.
  • jheising · 5 months ago
    Wow. I have a rack in Fischer Plaza and our servers have been fine all day. Luckily for us it must have been confined to a smaller area.
  • jheising · 5 months ago
    Actually are you guys sure this is a fire? Our colo company said it was just a massive power outage.

    http://www.adhost.com/blog/2009/07/03/fisher-pl...
  • Andy · 5 months ago
    I can't believe they don't have an active-active system. Not a good disaster recovery plan.
  • Art · 5 months ago
    It's absolutely ludicrous that a company that processes 65 BILLION Dollars a year....

    A) Does not have redundancy.
    B) Does not have a single person answering the phone (yea, so what it's a holiday weekend)
    C) Can't update their customers from their website!

    As a medium size company that not only processes through Authnet for our accounts and has clients that process through Authnet, I will NEVER EVER recomend Authnet again!

    I hope that someone from Authnet reads this!
  • matthewmiller · 5 months ago
    Look at these guys www.ippay.com no gateway need at all