Fire Damages Data Center for Authorize.Net

Worldwide Credit Card Processing Halted for Online Retailers

This morning at 8 a.m. central daylight time, I tried to buy some half-price gift certificates from my local radio station only to discover that the transaction center was unable to process credit card payments.

Frustrated, I set the site to email me when the problem was resolved and came to terms with the idea that I might not be able to get one of the 50 gift certificates being sold at half-price.

Turns out, my credit cards woes were just the beginning of an international credit card processing problem. Authorize.net which processes credit card payments for hundreds of companies around the globe was the victim of a major fire in the early morning hours Friday at its location in Seattle.

The end result: Hundreds of online retailers are left without the ability to process credit card payments.

According to TechCrunch.com, tens of thousands of businesses are left without the ability to take payments because of the outage caused by the fire at the data center. Worse yet, because the call center for the company is closed for the Independence Day holiday weekend, most of the calls to the company asking when the situation might be rectified have gone unanswered.

After about 11 a.m. central time, Authorize.net had set up a twitter account to keep its customers and their customers up to date on the outage and attempt to provide some information about the expected return to service. As of 12:30 p.m., the company had posted via Twitter that much of its processing was available, though global processing still seemed to be out.

The company confirmed that the fire had not only damaged the primary data center, but that a secondary data center seemed to have been impacted during the outage and was causing additional problems in getting credit card processing back up.

Since holiday weekends and days when people are given a work holiday are traditionally very busy times for cyber retailers, the timing of the fire is especially devastating for online shops.

By 12:30 p.m. central time, the authorize.net twitter account had 1,700 followers, many of whom are waiting for the tech giant to restore service so that they can resume business.