If you're one of the many online retailers that rely on Authorize.NET as their payment gateway - today may have been a very painful day. I say maybe because if you're one of the websites that cannot take new orders because of this outage - you may want to look into a new eCommerce platform. Some, more sophisticated eCommerce platforms, allow for orders to continue even if the payment gateway is totally down. OrderDynamics retailers have been able to accept orders on their websites even if Authorize.NET is their only payment gateway.
What appears to be the result of a datacenter fire in their Seattle facility (located at Fisher Plaza), Authorize.NET has been down for over 5 hours already on July 3rd 2009. Many are hoping the sales volumes will be lower due to the statutory holiday for tomorrow's July 4th celebration of Independence Day happening today, Friday.
With regular updates coming from their recent twitter account, Authorize.NET is taking responsibility and also claiming their backup datacenter also failed. *At time of writing, Authorize.NET's website was also down - most likely hosted in the same facility. Details are spare as the company is focusing on bringing up their systems.
"An event like today underscores the need for online retailers need to think about their Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans and ensure their eCommerce platform provider can meet these requirements." Says Steven Berkovitz, On-Demand Platform Architect.
An important feature of the OrderDynamics on-demand eCommerce solution is its ability to still capture orders during a gateway failure, making them available for later processing. This allows shoppers to keep buying as normal. "Orders are still captured, shoppers get an order number and confirmation email, then when the gateway is alive, the system will process them automatically." explains Steven. "The last thing you want is to loose the order - this is the equivalent of closing your physical location instead of taking a credit card manually or cash."
"Another feature of our platform is the ability for OrderDynamics to dynamically route orders to different gateways or completely fail-over payment gateways if needed." Continues Steven. "Our platform is integrated with every major payment gateway and over 20 alternative payment brands; allowing for ultimate flexibility and reliability."
OrderDynamics also has redundant datacenters as part of its On-Demand eCommerce SaaS Platform and enhanced service plans that provide up to 99.9% service availability through a fully replicated Disaster Recovery plan to its secondary facility over 75kms away.
Be sure to follow the twitter feed for updates and if you'd like to learn more about how Payment Gateways are used, see this Informed Merchant Article.
