Single Fire stops much Internet Commerce
Well, looks like absolutely nobody is capable of learning about redundancy. Last night a single fire in a data center in Seattle has completely taken down authorize.net. Authorize.net is arguably the biggest player in Internet credit card processing, so it appears that a very large percentage of the ecommerce sites on the Internet have been out since some time last night. Rumor has it that either most of the credit-card processing has come up, or will soon, as they attempt to get power restored to the building (the rumor is that sprinkler systems took out all the emergency generators).
Now, I certainly know that I've been at times remiss in providing enough global redundancy in our hosting facilities. But on the other hand, most of the US doesn't depend on me to process credit cards. We keep seeing this - big Internet infrastructure failures based on a single data center issue. This isn't unusual - I don't know how many of the companies that I used to consult with were int the same boat, including one major contractor that told us that they didn't need a data recovery plan because there was no way that they'd ever suffer a natural disaster. I had to point out to them that in fact the very building we were standing in during the conversation had been wiped out by a tornado 30 years previous. They were not amused, and apparently didn't care.
Since this keeps on happening, let's hope that someone starts to take this seriously. Ever been to a store that couldn't sell you anything because their computer system was down?
Okay, I'm out of rant mode - but it continues to amaze me that nobody seems to take any of this seriously, even if they're a huge corporation on which thousands (in this case I'm sure hundreds of thousands) of businesses depend.
