Category: Technology Author : Kim LaCapria Posted: July 3, 2009
Tags : authorize.net, authorize.net fire, fires, Twitter
Score one for bricks and mortar shopping.
Seattle based authorize.net was offline for hours this morning following a fire at a data center at Seattle’s Fisher’s Plaza. Reportedly many companies were affected, but authorize.net is the only one responsible for millions of online transactions daily. The fire apparently triggered sprinkler systems, as fires often do, and brought down many machines that haven’t been offline “in years.”
To keep customers informed of the status of repairs and accessibility, the company wisely set up a Twitter account. A series of dramatic tweets were ushered in by this first one at 11AM EST:
#authorizenet We are down due to a fire at our primary data center in Seattle. We are working to restore services, but no ETA at this time.
Around noon, the company updated:
#authorizenet I understand transaction processing is back up with the exception of Global processing. We are working to bring that up ASAP.
Although the company has provided information about the current status of transaction processing, questions remain about transactions posted during the outage:
#authorizenet Lots of questions re: post downtime e.g. transactions without auth code. Will post comm with answers once I have them.
Teams hope to restore power to the building by 1:30PM PST. This is the second major epic fail outage at Fisher Plaza in the past year.
Jul 3, 2009
This is amazing. I can't believe how well and efficient they are at getting these things back up and operational.
Jul 3, 2009
Ugh, this is not reassuring. Why don't they have more than one data center?
Jul 3, 2009
We, http://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…
Jul 3, 2009
I am from china, my english name is jojo, rum more places make more friends
Now i am senior student, thanks for like me of here, my Hobbies is golf, design website, swim, drawing, photoshop, music, shopping, I just designed my business website http://www.asiahandbag.com and http://www.good-handbag.com over 1 month ago..And I just feel my websites not getting that many views at all..It seem like they are staying the same…How am i supposed to sell, if no one is really going thru my items…I feel my website is website worthy, and have tried to remain confident, i will promoting website by myself, i think my website will more and more popular, come on jojo!
Jul 3, 2009
Seattle fire affects Tech Companies
Boise, ID- July 3, 2009– LiveRez, (http://www.liverez.com ) the emerging leader in online vacation rental booking software, escaped a major technological mishap due to prevention.
A fire at Seattle high rise Fisher Plaza late Thursday night disrupted Internet service for several companies – including one that handles online credit card transactions for hundreds of thousands of businesses. LiveRez.com was one of those businesses.
LiveRez, a complete online vacation rental property management solution, is focused on increasing bookings and making property managers fully operational to maximize online bookings.
Due to forward thinking business owner Mr. Tracy Lotz, business at LiveRez.com has continued without a hiccup.
A manual switch was programmed during the creation of LiveRez.com, which gives the Property Owner the option of handling credit card processing in house. Early this morning, when news broke of the fire, the LiveRez.com support staff went to work contacting each of their property managers via telephone, e-mail and Twitter– walking them through the simple step of clicking the manual credit card option, and its business as usual.