This ITWorld article titled Authorize.net categorizes downtime events as ‘a perfect storm’ discusses some downtime of Authorize.net’s authorization services over the holiday weekend due to a fire at a data center:
Key points were:
- Long Holiday Weekend IT engineers were off on holiday and took time to address the issue.
- Fire Department wouldn’t allow access to the building or operation of backup generators
- Article raises concerns on the backup data center:
- Authorize.Net did not have “out-of-band” communication methods and eventually opened a twitter account to communicate with customers.
Of more concern is the question of a back-up data
center . Authorize.net states that they were approaching capacity of their current backup data center and they were in the midst of transitioning to a new one: a true “hot” site (in other words, real-time synchronization), so that the Authorize.Net platform could be switched from one data center to the other “on the fly.” When the fire took out the primary data center, they attempted to fail over to the new, still-in-testing backup data center and encountered “a number of unanticipated errors.” They offer no explanation as to why they tried to fail over to the new backup data center rather than the old (presumably well-tested) one.
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