Fire at Authorize.net Datacenter has Merchants Fired Up
Authorize.net, along with several other major online companies, was down for up to 15 hours after a fire at the Fisher Plaza, a “world class” datacenter in Seattle, Washington Thursday.
Sometime around 11PM on July 2 an electrical short in a parking garage beneath Seattle’s Fisher Plaza caused a small fire that set off fire alarms and sprinklers. Fisher Plaza’s datacenter is home to numerous online companies including Authorize.net, one of the largest online payment gateways in the world.
The fire department cut power to the building and evacuated all personnel. The sprinklers soon flooded the datacenter’s generator rooms, leaving the building without backup power.
The outage affected hundreds of thousands of e-commerce merchants who rely on Authorize.net to process credit card payments for their websites. Some estimate the losses in the hundreds of millions. (more…)
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