Authorize.net, a major e-commerce processor, suffered a major outage of its infrastructure on July 3rd, bringing many purchasing and transactions to a halt.

The cause of the outage is a fire at a building in Seattle's Fisher Plaza, according to the Web site of the Seattle news Web site, the Post-Intelligencer. Besides bringing Authorize.net down, the fire at a server farm also caused disruptions to other Web sites and Seattle TV stations.

No outage is good, but this is a particularly bad time for Authorize.net to be down: it's the start of a busy holiday weekend, when people are off work and likely to be spending a lot of money on travel, barbecuing supplies, and the like. According to an article on Mashable.com (below), Authorize.net is the "largest service for accepting credit cards and e-checks through the web."

The article notes that although Authorize.Net is down, the company has set up a Twitter account (@AuthorizeNet) to keep people up to date on the problem. Mashable also says that transaction processing is back but that "global processing is still down."

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