Slashdot Mirror
Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce
1sockchuck writes "A major power outage at Seattle telecom hub Fisher Plaza has knocked payment processing provider Authorize.net offline for hours, leaving thousands of web sites unable to take credit cards for online sales. The Authorize site is still down, but its Twitter account attributes the outage to a fire, while AdHost calls it a 'significant power event.' Authorize.net is said to be trying to resume processing from a backup data center, but there's no clear ETA on when Fisher Plaza will have power again."
Redundancy ain't just a river in Egypt.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...should switch to twitter to do all their authorizations.
I know I'd feel much safer if Ashton Kutcher was processing my credit card.
Hmm. Power outage stops /. posts. News at 11
"She's furniture with a pulse"
It's absurd that a service provider like AuthorizeNet can be taken down by any single point of failure. I run a much, much smaller business and even we have our resources distributed widely enough that it would require a terrorist attack on New York PLUS an earthquake in San Francisco to knock us offline.
http://twitter.com/AuthorizeNet/status/2455435020 Hopefully someone made an offsite backup as well.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
News at 11...
tomorrow.
Bing Travel servers are located in the same server hall. More info: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6721
Apparently Verizon has a single point of failure for much of its FiOS for the metro areas of Western Washington state in this building as well so the FiOS customers are offline as well right now.
Hot/Hot is always a more ideal solution than Hot/Warm or Hot/Cold for disaster recovery (and increasing equipment utilization/ROI), and this event demonstrates why.
Where everyone tests their backups and failovers, because when the crap hits the fan for real everyone just sticks their head in the sand and then blames a third party post mortem
... that authorize.net does not have a failover site.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
When this happens in this day and age the CIO should be fired! There is no excuse. It's a situation where you gamble that this will never happen but when it does you should go.
Fisher Plaza is supposed to be a regional telecomm / communications / medical care hub for the Seattle area. It was designed and built to *not* crash, even in a magnitude 9.5 quake. Sounds like they've got work to do ...
1: ACTS OF GOD ...
Meteor strike, lightnight strike, extreme weather
2: ACTS OF MALICE ...
War, terrorism, extortion, employee sabotage, criminal attacks
3: WEAK INFRASTRUCTRUCTURE ...
Underpowered networks, inadequate UPS backups, skeleton staffing, the shaving of safety margins as an efficiency exercise, inadequate rate of replacing old hardware
4: MANAGEMENT ARSINESS
This is when a problem starts, and the people in charge either don't know how to react, don't care, or prioritise face-saving over actual problem-solving. This happens when you get an outage, and instead of system management promptly calling all their critical clients to inform them, and warn them that there's maybe twenty minutes of UPS capacity in the routers if the system's not fixed by then, they instead cross their fingers and hope that things'll work out, and worry about what to tell the clients afterwards.
Fisher Plaza seems to have suffered from a case of #4 recently, so it's not surprising that they've gone down again. The first time should have been the wakeup call to show them that their human systems were in need of an overhaul. Without that overhaul, you're setting up a dynamic in which the second time it happens, things are even worse (because now people are locked into defensive mode).
No matter how advanced your technological systems, if the people running it have the wrong mindset, you're gonna go down. And when you go down, you're gonna go down far far harder than necessary.
Eric Baird
This is a common problem in this datacenter. The red candy like emergency power shut off button is located right by the exit door. Noobs think it is the door release.
...except it failed as well. From their twitter:
"@gotwww The backup data center was impacted too. Don't have info as to why. The team is solely focused on getting us back up for now."
And on a holiday. Bummer. :(
The media are also following the story, KOMO a local station was knocked offline but are broadcasting from a backup site.
Way to go guys! At least two national, and maybe even international, ICT companies on whom numerous affiliates depend upon fail to provide for an adequate backup facility and continuity plan, yet the local AM radio station manages to pull it off. I'm guessing that some heads are gonna roll after the holiday weekend...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
When this happens in this day and age the CIO should be fired!
And if the CIO recommended a redundant D.C. but the CEO, CFO or Board rejected it as "too expensive"????
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Oh noes! Whatever shall we do if e-commerce gets disrupted?
Because we all know that the cha-chinging of virtual cash registers is the very music of the spheres that keeps the Universe in motion.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I know redundancy and such is better on business stuff, but this kind of reminds me of the fact how customer lines have lots of single failure points aswell. There was a day when TeliaSonera's, large nordic ISP, DHCP stopped working, leading 1/3 of the whole country's residents without internet access. Turns out there was a hardware failure on the dhcp server, leading me to believe that they actually depend on just one server to handle all the dhcp requests coming from customers. They did fix it in a few hours, but it was still unavailable for the rest of the day because hundreds of thousands computer's were trying to get an ip address from it. That being said, I remember it happening only once, but it still seems stupid.
... who's broadcast facilities reside in this building (they were broadcasting from a park on Queen Anne hill this morning), it was due to a transformer vault fire. The resulting sprinkler operation rendered their backup generator inoperable.
Being in the power biz, this sort of thing is to be expected in typical office buildings. Sometimes the power goes out. Live with it. What really puzzles me is how someone can take such a structure, install a raised floor and some big A/C units on the roof and sell it as a data center. This kind of crap goes on all the time, as I've seen purpose built data centers go down for single point failures.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Our current estimate for re-establishing Bing Travel functionality is 5pm PST," says a notice at Bing
When someone in a technical role screws up a timezone designation, for me that is always a red flag that they are sloppy with facts, and I need to closely watch their other decisions, actions and statements, because they may be in over their head.
One simple rule for its versus it's
You know we had something similar happen (North Central AR) a few years back. We had over 70k people with zero Internet anything for two days. They couldn't get medical records, use CC, hell the three towns affected pretty much ground to a halt. The cause? The lines heading out to the main branch all converged on a single big fiber trunk that some dumbass farmer nailed with his backhoe while digging a ditch.
So while you can hope there is enough redundancy in the system to keep catastrophic failures like this from occurring, the simple fact is we have no idea how much of our critical infrastructure can be taken down with a single fuck up. Maybe the US gov needs to find out which companies we depend on have such single points of failure and demand redundancy for critical infrastructure? Of course with bribery....uhhh I mean lobbying being legal the mega corps would just use it as another excuse for a bailout which they would stuff in their pockets instead of doing what we paid for. Kinda like how they took those billions we gave them for nationwide broadband and gave us the finger in return.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_fisher_plaza_fire.html?source=mypi
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009415646_webfisherplaza04.html
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Sounds more like Fischer Price. Glad that none of customers rely on Authorize.net.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Imagine my surprise at learning that the problem is big enough to make /.. Actually, what's even more surprising is the unplanned outage in the first place: I don't recall Adhost ever going down for this long, especially in the middle of the day.
I used to manage a 22 rack cage that we leased from Internap at Fisher Plaza back in 2005. They really did build the place well. Massive diesel generators, independent well water, redundant cooling, etc. But it was designed to survive and continue broadcasting for a local news station for 18 days without resupply in the event of a major external disaster like an earthquake.
I imagine they are reviewing their DR procedures and designs now to minimize collateral damage from internal factors.
But let's not be too hard on them, it was one of the better colo facilities I've seen. There are far worse out there holding their pants up with three hands.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
They should also fire the person who was responsible for having a sprinkler installed above a transformer, exactly how is spraying water on a transformer going to help in a fire?
This is the 2nd fire since 2008... Apparently Internap rent the power from the building so they have no control over the quality/maintenance of these generators and UPSes.
The fire which started around 11:30 PM (or maybe earlier, but first signs were around that time) damaged badly some of the electrical risers, so they are unable to get power back so some parts of the datacenter. According to their last update they're getting external generators to bypass the damaged equipment and power up the rest of the datacenter, which should be completed late this evening... At best it's going to be a nearly full day outage for some of their customers.
When this happens in this day and age the CIO should be fired! And if the CIO recommended a redundant D.C. but the CEO, CFO or Board rejected it as "too expensive"????
If that's the case, then the aformentioned officers should give up their pay to the thousands of merchants who lost their day's pay due to this problem. Yeah, like that'll happen.
Phone lines occasionally go out and that might affect local merchants, but when it's a data center that handles the livelihoods of thousands of merchants, there needs to be much greater redundancy. The businesses that are affected by this are not all huge e-tailers either. Many are just small operators trying to make a living on the web. As it stands now, a merchant can't have multiple card processors unless he's willing to pay the monthly fees for two processors. I've never heard of that being done and doubt it would be feasible.
Merchants affected by this will just have to suck it up, but for those who are not involved in e-commerce, this is a shining example of how doing business with credit card processors is dancing with the devil. They screw you on all of the charges, they screw you on chargebacks, and now they've screwed a lot of small business people by denying them income, probably because it wasn't cost effective to have a first class backup plan.
Happy Independence Day!
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
http://twitpic.com/966ee
The Twitpic link works fine from the place I found it but not when clicked via slashdot???
I can't buy any cheddar here? But it's the most popular cheese in the world!
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
All fine and good... There is no possible way to design the entire world with redundant systems. But a company like Authorize.net doesn't have that excuse. Hopingh has nothing to do with it, it's called network engineering. They should have multiple data centers located in geographically dispersed parts of the world. This is hosting 101 for any large-scale internet business. The OP is right, the CIO should be cleaning out his desk as we speak.
I had to work today to find and fix a bug related to a particular external site... sure enough, our internet access was down.
Pfft! I had a copy of Barry on a linux box, tethered my BlackBerry, a bit of iptables magic, and I'm back online to test.
In Liberty, Rene
Google Checkout and Amazon Payments -- there's your redundancy, both with neither setup nor monthly fees.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
And if the CIO recommended a redundant D.C. but the CEO, CFO or Board rejected it as "too expensive"????
Then they fire the CIO post-haste and blame the whole thing on him.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Neither Google Checkout or Amazon Payments look like a good substitute for card-present transactions, while authorize.net has a card-present interface (among others).
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex