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.

authorize twitter Authorize.net Down: E Commerce Freezes

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