I’m not for sure how many other people use authorize.net, but as of some time around midnight I started noticing we were getting “Failed” credit card transactions that simply say, “Processor does not reponse”. After I chuckled at the broken English, I started to search and found out that authorize.net appears to have had a fire in their Seatle branch.
Here is what is supposed to be their Twitter account…
[url]http://twitter.com/AuthorizeNet[/url]
I must admit that I am SHOCKED that there would not be some type of backup that should have kicked in by now.
–Our Work Around–
As for a solution to be able to accept credit cards, the way that we have done it is to set up an “offline” credit card to accept credit cards for short term. Once authorize.net is back up we will “edit order” and then process the cards one at a time. This way our customers do not get the “Declined” message.
We do still accept Paypal but did not want to stear all customers that direction as it tends to deter customers.
Likewise we have an account with Google, but did NOT turn it on because of the annoying 3 second rule that they have on shipping.
Has anyone else figured out another work around?
Does anyone accept credit cards through multiple processors to avoid situations like this?
This is the first time we have ran in to something like this, but I guess I need to have a better “back up” plan since it appears that authorize.net seems to be lacking.
In their defense, I know anything can happen outside of what is expected. I guess I just expect a little too much from them.
Major bummer about auth.net. But thank you for the backup plan! I set that up also. Now we still have to wait for authorize to be up before manually processing these things…
Pretty crazy that things are down this long. I’m actually shocked that they didn’t have a better backup plan in place, even for a major fire. At least a second facility in another state or something I would have guessed.
Jason
We are facing the same here I started noticing failed orders , luckily I noticed in time called the customers and told them of the situation , I have been able to use the virtual terminal once this morning after that nothing. We another processor we use locally ,So it will be it for now. but I’m shocked as the rest of you to see this happening with no backup in place.
For right now we are able to process cards from our sites again. It appears to only have taken about 8 hours to have a “plan b” up and rolling at authorize.net. Ouch!