Is Authorize.net Down Again?

A week later - is Authorize attacked again?

[hfwd]

We've noticed intermittent problem & slow connection to Authorize. Anyone else see this?

Also, have your sales recovered from last week's attack? We're still down 50% - even though Authorize claims no ddos problem anymore...

[tylerh]

We were fine yesterday and then this morning have had intermittant problems as well. Looks like we are having the same problems you are. I have sent in an email to support and am waiting to hear back.

[boxerman]

Same problem here, off and on all day. This is killing us. Waiting for a reply to support.

Anyone have a good alternative with low transaction fees and that integrates with oscommerce?

[GaryS622]

Yep, they're definitely still buggered. Either the filters aren't working or they somehow slow the system down.

It's been up and down as far as access. I've been placing orders on my own store to gauge how it's doing (I have a steady supply of customers who called their info in to use as examples). It's usually been wait 5, wait 15, wait a bit more and it goes. Today has been a really bad day. Except for "free" orders (I do some fulfillment stuff for clients where a coupon pays for everything and I bill the client), I've gotten NO orders since very early this morning.

I use Miva, so I don't know if it works with osCommerce, but Verisign and Linkpoint come to mind as alternatives that support major carts...

[GaryS622]

I should have said "Cardservice International." I used to use them - got away from them for business reasons, but didn't have problems with their gateway.

That said, today it's authorize and tomorrow it could be anyone else. I'm going to stick it out another week. Trying to figure out how to implement manual CC collection and off-line processing...

[GaryS622]

Update - today they seem to be running. I've got my store a little better configured now to drop back to simple validation if needed.

In talking to authorize customer service folks, I've gotten some really good tall tales to add to my collection...

[hfwd]

What do you mean by "tall tales", GaryS622? Do you mean there's other reasons Authorize was intermittently down & up besides the ddos attack?

[Compworld]

Yea, I cannot process any transactions either. I have been denying payments because they we all denied. Is there anyway to do a work around or when this would be corrected?

CompWorld

[GaryS622]

As for their fundamental problems, I don't know. I assume that the DoS was truthfully the major problem behind their unavailability.

What I mean by "tall tales" was the steaming mounds of BS I have gotten from their support personnel when I complained that my site was completely unavailable to process credit cards for about 24 hours late last week until I temporarily switched to simple validation. Rather than admit that they were continuing to have troubles, either due to the DoS itself or due to continued tweaking of their servers in response, they threw "solutions" at me that were just boilerplate, non-helpful baloney.

One they gave me in a chat session was that I was probably not getting transactions through because my hosting company probably had me on a NAT, which is a system where multiple machines share an IP address. The theory was that since authorize is now limiting number of transactions per IP per time interval across the board, this might be the problem.

My hosting company rep laughed when I asked about this and said that they hadn't been using that kind of protocol in years, if ever, and that it's more commonly used in a LAN setting, not an internet server farm.

I realize tech support sometimes has to chase down alternative scenarios, but I think there's a point where it kind of ceases to be honest or to say the least is grasping at straws. Relatively early during this crisis, I feel authorize.net flew onto the carrier deck and said "mission accomplished." I actually had more site problems for longer stretches of time AFTER they did this.

[hfwd]

I know what you're saying Gary - we have intermitent inability to process cc & slow connection problems to authnet well after their email and posted update on the website saying "if you continue to have problems, it's just you".

[hasm]

Since I rely on forums like this to let me know when AuthNet is down...they are down again since 2 AM Pacific time (it's 2:40 now). I keep telling myself this is the last straw, and that I'm going to switch to Verisign, maybe this will finally be it.

My favorite line from an article in the E-Commerce Times, a few weeks ago: "You could measure the entire time we've been unavailable in minutes rather than hours"

[wackal]

I use Authorize.Net and we have noticed no down time at all. I'm curious as to why some people are experiencing this and others are not. What connect method do you use? Is it Weblink or SIM or AIM? Also, is there a general time of day that the system is down. We don't process real time, but we do all the charges between 8 and 11pm. Perhaps their systems can't handle the load during the day?

[GaryS622]

When you say you "don't process real time" -- do you mean you're doing simple validation and actually entering the cards and charging them at night? If so, you probably WON'T have problems. The problem comes in when you're using real-time authorization, because the store transaction depends on authorize.net's gateway server to return information about the transaction before you can continue.