Authorize.net down from a single fire

[amxfan]

A fire in Fisher Plaza, Seattle has cause a massive power outage causing leading IP-based payment gateway solution Authorize.Net to go down around approximately 11:15pm PST 7/2/09.

One of the largest gateways is brought down by a single fire taking online merchants and store fronts down with it. For the life of me I do not understand why a company of this size dealing with a magnitude of businesses from small to multimillion dollar would be set up in such a fashion that this would and could happen. You would have thought they would have had a backup of some sort in place just in case this happened. What are your thoughts on this?

[wige]

Personally, I am all for redundancy, but there is only so far you can go. Most sites have redundant power backups, redundant network connections, etc. However, none of that does any good if a disaster destroys everything in the area. For instance part of the authorize.net system is done over the phone - backups are great, but they can't get around the physical destruction of all the lines in an area. Colocation is one possible solution, but considering the amount of data that has to be available to process these transactions, and the inherent security issues, it might simply not be possible to have multiple copies of the database synchronized at multiple facilities.

TL;DR: It happens, and it isn't always avoidable.