Update: Authorize.Net Crash Left Vendors Hanging, Service Up, But Global Processing Still Slow

July 3, 2009 2:18 p.m. EST

Mountain View, CA (AHN) - Servers at Authorize.net went down early this morning due to a fire at a Seattle datacenter leaving thousands of online vendors without the ability to accept electronic payments. Service is back up but global processing is still slow.

Authorize.net, a credit card processor for a wide range of e-commerce businesses went down around 2:15 a.m. ET, according to recent reports.

The outage is being blamed on a fire at Fisher Plaza, a Seattle datacenter that has not only knocked out the company's electronic payment processing service, but caused their Website and backup center to falter.

The company found a workaround in the meantime by setting up a new twitter account as way to communicate updates to their customers.

Just before 2 p.m. ET, Authroize.net said on its twitter account that transactions are up and running in the U.S., but global processing remains down.

The near 10-hour outage likely cost online merchants millions in lost revenue, especially with today being the first day of the holiday weekend.

Authorize.net is a unit of CyberSource Corporation. In the company's fiscal first quarter, 553 million billable transactions were processed holding a value of roughly $27.7 billion.

The company provides electronic payment processing for 262,000 customers around the world. The exact number of customers impacted by the Authorize.net outage is not known, but is believed to be easily in the thousands.