Regarding Authorizenet

[StevenAllen]

Since Emerchantsgroup is a reseller of Authorizenet we received the following from them:

"At approximately 3:20 PM Pacific time, the payment gateway experienced a brief unplanned downtime resulting from a large scale power outage at the data center of our primary Internet Service
Provider (ISP). Your ability to process transactions and/or access the Merchant Interface may have been temporarily disrupted.

The security and reliability of the payment gateway is our highest priority. The data centers that house our servers are state of the art and include numerous power sources and backup systems. At the
time of the power failure, we immediately began implementing our disaster recovery plans; however, power was reinstated in short order, negating the need for further action. The reason for today's
failure is not yet known, however we will work closely with the data center to investigate the failure to assure that this type of event
does not occur again in the future.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced as a result of this uncontrollable downtime. Transaction processing and Merchant Interface access are now fully restored."

Also - there's a scheduled downtime on January 19th from 12:00am to 2:00am PDT.

[walker]

That was a nice pro-active response on their part.

You would think that authorize.net would have redundant data centers though.

[StevenAllen]

I am guessing this will be a little bit of a wake up call for Authorizenet.

[brian.mark]

Verisign has had issues as well (specifically last Christmas season), so I don't think any payment processor is totally immune. If those 2 can have outages, anyone can.

As for a second data center, that'd be tough. Since they need a transactional database, a second datacenter would have to be connected to the same database server, which just doesn't work all that well. I've got some friends at First Data (FDR) and have seen just how much of a mess that can become in a hurry. A secondary connection should take over in a situation like this, but that's probably the unexplained part they mentioned since they said primary ISP.

Just my 2 cents.

Brian.

[Corey Bryant]

It is difficult to run two datacenters, but FDR does do it fortunately for their LinkPoint gateway. You need at least two I would think in different parts of the country to help to maintain some connectivity.

And then of course, FDR also helps to verify the transactions of Authorizenet.com, LinkPoint and a few other gateways on their platforms - which is a different story altogether. (Not too sure if this might be what you were referring to Brian or not.)