Verisign Payment processing down?

[da_clicks]

We use Verisign's credit card payment processing gateway - is anyone else noticing that this is currently down?

[IvoryHelmet]

payflo pro is down/spotty for us all day

[h8stn4d]

Yes--they are down. And they are also closed today for President's day. Totally pathetic.

[IvoryHelmet]

Paypal's 888 phone message is that they are aware of the intermittant bad connectivity issues and working on it.

:(

[topguy29]

Did they send out a notice saying they would be working on it? I know I usually get a message from LinkPoint telling me that maintenance will be performed at a certain time, but I never had any problems with it being down

[IvoryHelmet]

no email waas sent.

Backup and stable for last 15 minutes.

Let's hope for the best :)

thanks

[ecommerceprofit]

"Yes--they are down. And they are also closed today for President's day. Totally pathetic"

Great statement! I don't use these guys but I hate companies like this! ADP Payroll processing does not allow customers to log in on the weekends starting Friday at 5 PM - it is amazing how stupid some companies can be! The CEOs should be fired by the board - you know what else I hate? When a creidt card company, bank, whatever will not allow more than 6 months of archives to be searched or reports printed out. I lost a credit card statement but the credit card company only allowed me to print back 6 months - I had to have it snail mailed to me. What? They cannot afford a few more terrabytes of hard drive space? geeshhh

[eskipii]

I started seeing the problem after 8:30 AM EST.
Still not resolved.

[da_clicks]

Seems to be working for me now.

[smallbiz]

Verisign Payflow Pro has been down since around 9:20AM Eastern for us, about 6.5 hours so far. Half an hour ago, it worked for 10mn and then failed again. No support available from them, a message that they are closed today! Even though they are down, they will only speak to you if you pay for premium support. No email notification of any kind. Very frustrating. It seems their support went down instead of improving after Paylpal acquisition. We missed about 3 hours of orders on our site before switching to accepting orders without approval. Looking at alternatives with better track record. I would appreciate suggestions.

Michael

[smallbiz]

9 hours since it went down and no communications or support from Paypal. Worst service and no customer support.

[amanS]

I never had a problem contacting Verisign before Pay Pal. They are still down and I am losing allot of money!

[smallbiz]

We never had a problem like this with Verisign and we had them for years. Furthermore, we never had any problem reaching support when we had issues.

Since Paypal bought PayflowPro support went down for us as well. However, Paypal's carelessness today is beyond all the bad stories I have heard and says as much as anyone would want to know about a company.

We are considering Authorize.net, Cybersource.com, and PaymentTech.com to replace Paypal PayflowPro. Any feedback on these 3 would be great.

[eskipii]

With Payflow for 5 years, since Paypal got them it has been downhill...

[bwnbwn]

Verisign's credit card payment is about what you would expect from paypal....I would move now before you suffer anymore. As someone stated "Linkpoint" I have been using them for 5 years now I think we have been down less than ya'll have been in this one failure. O yea this includes them moving the complete system to a new center I assume to make it more stable earthquackes in California same as Google building the new datacenter in NC>>>>

Sorry ya'll are taking a big hit but sometimes it takes that to wake us up....Move now.

Bret we have cancelled our paypal account I hope you have another way to take payments if not I guess when I run out I won't be able to pay....

[joestern]

Gotta say - I was pretty nervous when PayPal acquired Verisign, but until this pathetic fiasco, I haven't had any problems.

Now if only they'd take a page from JetBlue's book and actually admit to and deal with the underlying issues . . .

I'd fly JetBlue again in a heartbeat, but the last two times I needed payment processors for other companies, I used Authorize.net just due to the PayPal issue, and I'm not sorry at all.

[smallbiz]

They are back up now but for us, it was about 14 hours! No acknowledgement of any kind from Paypal except for the message on their voice mail indicating "intermittent issues" yesterday and even that took them 3 hours to do. Disappointed that it did not make more noise. Anyway, it is their true color. We already contacted other gateways to change asap.

[damon williams]

hi everyone, i just signed up for the forums today and found this thread. i work at paypal and manage the developer program. i realize the outage on monday was unfortunate.

-damon

[edited by: lorax at 6:13 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[joestern]

Great post - thanks for all the info.

[eskipii]

hi Damon,

good to have someone here from paypal/payflow.

I agree with you that outage on monday was unfortunate.

But it was impossible to reach someone during the outage and we, your customers, were just left clueless.

thanks

[smallbiz]

Damon,

No offense intended to you personally but allow me to disagree.

Unfortunate is understating it. 1 hour would have been unfortunate. But 14 hours? Other gateway providers support their customers 24/7 even when all goes well. In this case, there was no service for a full day and the issue was not handled. There was no support from Paypal, not even pertinent communication. We were left with sites unable to process orders. We lost a day worth of business and who knows how many customers!

As a company providing a critical service to thousands of merchants who depend on it to run businesses, how can all this be justified? And, where is the accountability?

This was not only very unfortunate. It was grossly and carelessly mishandled.

Michael

[damon williams]

i agree with you here.

[edited by: lorax at 2:29 pm (utc) on Feb. 23, 2007]

[pp_rb]

Hi everyone,

We've gotten some more information on what happened in this case and I wanted to share that with you:

Earlier this week, we experienced hardware issues with the Payflow Gateway and Website Payment Pro products. Due to this issue, merchants using the Payflow Gateway and some merchants using Website Payments Pro were not able to process payments. PayPal’s Standard and Express Checkout products were not affected.

This issue was resolved on Monday, February 19th, and all payments are going through the Payflow Gateway and Website Payments Pro products without error.

We realize there has been a lack of communication regarding this issue. We are analyzing this issue in order to implement the appropriate communications in the future. We value our merchants and strive to improve our services in order to strengthen our partnerships with each of our customers going forward.

We value any input you may have as we work toward improving our communication processes.

[ecommerceprofit]

Good to see you are on this forum but why were you closed over the weekend? Have you changed your policy to be open 365 days a year 24 hours a day - you are not some smaqll merchant - I am not one of your customers but if I was I would expect a billion dollar company such as yourself open 24 hrs/day 365 days a year with no vacations - you can afford it and you are critical to merchant success. You are in effect a utility...

[pp_rb]

why were you closed over the weekend?

As far as I understand it, Payflow's Standard and Enhanced technical support options never covered holidays; only Premium support offered 24/7 support. I do not know yet what policy changes might be made in this regard, but I will be sure to provide your feedback to those who are considering what steps we should take to address this in the future.

EDIT:
It might not have been apparent from the prior posts in this discussion, but Payflow support is currently handled by a separate team from other PayPal support. The main PayPal customer service center does not offer 24/7 support but it is open on weekends and holidays.

[ecommerceprofit]

Good to see you are listening and letting people know in your organization!