The entire Authorize.Net infrastructure went down several hours ago. Authorize.Net is the largest service for accepting credit card payments via the internet. With Authorize.net down, millions of web-based transactions are frozen.
Authorize.Net has, very smartly, established a new Twitter account (@AuthorizeNet) to keep people informed about their recovery efforts.
A fire at their headquarters in Seattle apparently caused the outage.
This took out their website and transaction platforms, as well as their backup center. The fact that this happened on a major holiday in the U.S. is just icing on the cake.
UPDATE: Transaction processing has returned but although global processing is still down.
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