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.
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.
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. :(
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
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.
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
Focusing on something that 99% of us screw up at one point or another, particularly when our primary focus at the time is probably getting the service back online rather than checking the calendar to see if it's Daylight Saving Time or not, for me is always a red flag that you're an insufferable pedant.
"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.
It's quite likely that this message was not posted by somebody in a technical role, but a managerial role. The technical people may very well have just said "by 5:00" or possibly "by 5:00 Pacific Time", and whoever posted the notice on the web site (while the technical people were busy working on trying to fix things) added "PST" instead of "PDT".
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
That's pathetic. I've seen stores stay open during 24 hour POWER FAILURES! Any manager who does not teach their employees how to manually do credit card transactions (yes you can do them by paper!) should never have been hired in the first place.
When we lose power around here (once every 6 months or so), the stores stay open. They simply don't accept debit cards (which require a connection to the bank) until the power comes back on.
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.
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
Or (gasp!) make change without a computron! I wonder if they even train that in grocery stores anymore...scary, indeed.
I think the bigger issue in this case would be manually looking up the price for every single item. We tend to simplify selling things manually in this way (manually processing credit card transactions, making change manually, etc.), when really when really the biggest problem is being without the UPC system.