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Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the no-sigmas-for-you dept.

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."

3 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Heh by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Redundancy ain't just a river in Egypt.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  2. Re:No Backup?? by Nutria · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  3. Re:Oh, the humanity! by ErkDemon · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Actually -- in a totally unconnected incident -- my grocery shopping was disrupted today because (according to the note pinned to the closed store's shutters) the store's till server was down, and they'd shut up the shop while they waited for an engineer.

    I'm guessing that the server was probably local, possibly above the store, and might have gone fritzy in the heat.

    So, real-world implications of computer failure. A server goes down, and suddenly Eric Cannot Buy Cheese ("Aaaaiiiieeee!"). Eric has hard cash, store (presumably) has cheese, but store can no longer sell cheese to Eric. Or anything else.

    The shop "crashed".

    Okay, so I trudged off and did my grocery shopping elsewhere, but it was a little disturbing to think that we've already gotten to the point where a server problem can stop you buying food, in a "real" shop, with "real" money.

    --
    Eric Baird