Jul

authorize.net down

Posted by admin Published in Products

Authorize.Net Goes Down in Flames

Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours now. The service is used by thousands of vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites, it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.

Vendors are ringing their phones off the hook 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.

Reports say there was a fire at a Seattle datacenter during this U.S. holiday weekend which caused a massive technical failure.

The small fire broke out around 11 p.m. Thursday in the basement of Fisher Plaza at an electrical vault – the section of the building where city power lines meet the building’s transformers, said Seattle City Light spokesman Scott Thomsen.

Thomsen said that it appears equipment failure on the part of the customer caused the fire.

The fire forced the evacuation of the building and disrupted the late night newscast, said Rob Dunlop, vice president of operations for Fisher Communications Inc.

KOMO Radio and KOMO-TV are broadcasting Friday from remote locations.

Crews from several companies continue to work to get the building back on line, officials said.

Authorize.Net is a payment gateway service provider allowing merchants to accept credit card and electronic checks payments through their Web site and over an IP connection. Authorize.Net claims a user base of over 212,000 merchants, which would make them the Internet’s largest payment gateway service provider.

In November 2007 Cybersource purchased Authorize.Net for $565 million. Authorize.Net was originally purchased in 2004 by Lightbridge for $82 Million.