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

July 3, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments |

authorizenet-logoA fire in Seattle’s Fisher Plaza appears to have taken down Authorize.net, a service used by online businesses to process credit card and electronic check payments.

That’s a big problem for any vendor using Authorize.net, since this basically means they can’t accept payments through their website until the service is up again. I’m told this affects both one-time and recurring payments. With its website down, Authorize has set up a new Twitter account to provide updates and address the many customer complaints and questions. Many of the tweets can be boiled down to, “The team is working hard to get things running again, but I don’t have a timetable”; the company is also trying to reassure customers, “yes we have fully redundant data center” (sic), and also just said, “Transactions are up except for Global processing and Concord. No ETA on those, but we are working on in.”

The service has been down since around midnight Pacific time. I’m also trying to find out how many businesses are affected; TechCrunch says it’s “tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors,” but when Authorize.net was acquired by CyberSource back in 2007, it reportedly had 175,000 customers, and processed 1.1 billion transactions worth $65 billion in 2006.

Meanwhile, TechFlash notes the travel section of Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” is also down due to the fire. The Bing Travel website says the site should be back up at 5pm Pacific time today.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Peter Antypas
    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
    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.
  • 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
  • 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...
  • No excuse for this from a million dollar company. Glad I left AuthNet awhile back.
  • Rich
    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.
  • Whaaat? Wow, I didn't realize that.
  • seo_expert
    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
    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.
  • I suspect you're not alone in looking to switch.
  • jheising
    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
    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...
  • I can't believe they don't have an active-active system. Not a good disaster recovery plan.
  • Art
    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
    Look at these guys www.ippay.com no gateway need at all