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."
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.
It's interesting how many companies have assumed redundancy in place but never take the time to do proper testing. They figure that once a disaster happens, that everything will automatically work because their vendor or staff said so. To achieve true redundancy a company needs to do semi-frequent testing to ensure that everything is working properly. Authorize.net might have had what was assumed a redundant system in place, but once the disaster happen they soon realized their system wasn't designed or configured properly. It is expensive and time consuming to test redundancy, let alone actually paying for the redundant equipment/staff/etc, but in times like this it shows how one gets their moneys worth in doing so.
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
...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. :(
Come on, the guy's sig is a link to some comic rant about "its versus it's" which, whilst it annoys me no end, is most definitely a good indicator that he is, no doubt, an insufferable pedant.