Data center fire takes Authorize.net offline
This morning, the Authorize.net payment gateway went offline preventing thousands of vendors from accepting credit card payments including many FreshBooks customers. With their website and phone system unaccessible, Authorize.net has been fielding questions with their Twitter account this morning.
For FreshBooks customers using the Authorize.net gateways to automatically bill their customers, Authorize.net transactions that failed this morning will automatically be retried tomorrow morning. You will know this has happened as the status of your Authorize.net invoices will have changed to ‘retry’.
However, if Authorize.net is not back up by tomorrow morning, your invoices will change to the ‘failed’ status and the status will become a red active link. The ‘failed’ status link allows you to retry the payment any time in the future giving you to option to retry the transaction when Authorize.net becomes available.
Please note that although Authorize.net remains offline, all of our other payment gateways continue to function normally such as PayPal, Google Checkout, and Linkpoint.
Copyright © 2000-2010
1:59 pm
You figure they’d have a disaster recovery solution or multiple data centers for such situations. This does NOT look good for Authorize.Net!
4:00 pm
I’m truly surprised they don’t have multiple data centers. Most larger websites have distributed networks for performance, to have all your eggs in one basket is pretty stupid.
4:01 pm
Hey, on that note does fresh books have 2 data centers?
4:04 pm
@RM
Absolutely. We probably couldn’t sleep at night if we didn’t
8:11 am
I love Freshbooks! I was trying to purchase tickets for a concert I’m attending tonight and could not because they used Authorize.net. I wondered what the issue was for several hours. Now, I find out why with you all! It’s great that you keep us informed, even though this didn’t affect my account (I use PayPal).
6:01 pm
! I’ll bet there’s a resume tweaking happening this weekend. Can’t believe the number of business owners who don’t think they need a solid disaster recovery plan! (You can call me now…or you can call me later!)
9:29 pm
Apparently I was the first Freshbooks customer to notify you that there was a problem with AuthorizeNet and your tech staff worked with me to ascertain what the problem was and we found out quickly that their entire website was down. Thanks for the quick troubleshooting!
11:14 pm
WOW!
10:43 am
Just went to Authorize.net website and there is nothing about the issue at all. Are they back up yet?
11:03 am
@Chuck,
Hi Chuck. Yes, they are back up now. Their website came back online over the weekend along with most of their services. However, they have been fixing a number of glitches since then. You can follow their progress on their twitter feed as well as review their down time summary posted in your merchant interface.