Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging
It’s unclear when the downtime started exactly, but the consensus is somewhere between 5 and 7 hours at this point (11 AM Eastern), with e-commerce vendors desperately looking for ways to contact the company or get any first-hand information about what’s going on and when the problems will be resolved. Twitter, meanwhile, is buzzing with the news as the United States wakes up (hashtag #authorizenet).
According to some threads in hosting forums, which remain unverified for the moment, there was a fire at a Seattle datacenter during this U.S. holiday weekend which caused a massive technical failure.
We’re trying to get more information about the situation.
Update: nobody is picking up the phone at the U.S. offices of CyberSource, the holding company of Authorize.net. Someone I talked to at their UK offices couldn’t help me and told me I should keep trying the U.S. office.
Update 2: Nathan Cheeley writes:
A fire in Fisher Plaza, Seattle has cause a massive power outage causing leading IP-based payment gateway solution Authorize.Net to go down around approximately 11:15pm PST (last night).
A traffic reporter for KOMO News that operates out of Fisher Plaza tweeted that a fire set off the sprinkler system which fried the generators.
Update 3: Authorize.net has set up a brand new Twitter account to keep everyone updated, confirming the cause of the failure was a fire but also stating an ETA for resolution is not available at this time.
Update 4: a new tweet says backup was in place but that datacenter was impacted as well.
Update 5: tweet number 4 says “transaction processing is back up, with the exception of Global processing.” (12 AM Eastern)
Update 6: Or not. (12:30 AM Eastern)
Update 7: Authorize.net reports that full transaction processing has now been restored with Concord EFS.
(Thanks to everyone who sent this in)