Pay Attention: Authorize.net brought down by fire

Authorize.net is one of the better known success stories of Seattle’s tech industry. For years, they’ve been providing safe, reliable online transaction processing for small business merchants. That’s why it’s such a shock to see what’s going on right now.

According to recent reports, a fire broke out this morning at Fisher’s Plaza, which houses authorize.net’s primary datacenter. This fire apparently triggered the activation of the building’s sprinkler systems, which in turn shut down all servers stored in the building. (Including Authorize.net)

As I write this, their site still seems to be down.

As you might imagine, there are lots of questions coming in from affected merchants, and the company is asking for patience until everything is back in order before answering. One thing that they did right was the implementation of a Twitter account to keep customers informed as events unfold.

What really strikes me as odd about this incident is the fact that they hadn’t put a plan in place for this sort of thing, which would seem like a fairly common disaster scenario. This is especially surprising considering this is reportedly the second major outage in the past 12 months for this datacenter.

This company serves thousands of online merchants who are now incurring marketing costs while turning away sales. If enough customers switch over to a competitive service, it could cause some serious problems for the company.

I’m certain that the authorize.net has a good backup system in place, and that no customer data will be lost. Instead, what really concerns me is that they didn’t have some sort of failover facility in place to prevent downtime.

It’s not as if they would’ve had to purchase and maintain new equipment to do this. Now, there are a lot of Software as a Service (SaaS) companies offering temporary failover services that take over as soon as an incident like this occurs. Because it’s a rental model, there’s no need to purchase or maintain additional equipment.

I really hope that authorize.net is able to recover from this fire without too much trouble. This should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone reading, to always plan for the worst-case-scenario. Because the worst-case scenario just might happen to you.

About The Author:

Storagepipe Solutions is a leading provider of disaster recovery solutions that include online backup and email archiving services.