Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce 118
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
from the no-sigmas-for-you dept.
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."
Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Redundancy ain't just a river in Egypt.
Re:No Backup?? (Score:5, 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"????
Re:System failure (Score:3, Insightful)
5: Government...
A government that decides to come to your headquarters and decides they want all of your hardware pronto...
Re:Oh, the humanity! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:sloppy engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
"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".
Re:Oh, the humanity! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Oh, the humanity! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Authorize.Net did have a backup (Score:3, Insightful)
An auto switching power Y-cable with two inputs, and one output? ive never seen or heard of these.. Do you have a manufacturer or part number?
id defiantly like some.