Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net
has been down and out for several hours, a number of tipsters inform us.
That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of
e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on
their websites (example),
it likely means millions are being lost during its
downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.
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.