Service Status - Transparency Please

[moklett]

When there are service outages at Authorize.Net, it seems that the only place the outage is acknowledged is on Twitter.  For example, there was an "issue ... affecting some merchants" ackowledged yesterday on Twitter: https://twitter.com/authorizenet/status/473571248551624704

We process a large number of transactions via your service, and can tell pretty clearly when the issues start and end.  For yesterday's incident (June 2 2014), we observed that it began around 3:15pm EST and ended around 5:47pm EST.

The "official" acknowledgement came at 5:05pm EST (almost 2 hours late), while the announcement that the issue was resolved came 19 hours later at June 3 12:13pm EST (about 18.5 hours late - https://twitter.com/authorizenet/status/473860001350836224).

I would like to know the following:

• Is Twitter the official channel for status and outage reports from the company?  Or should we be looking somewhere else?
• Do you have plans to make these reports more timely?
• Do you have plans to include more helpful information in these reports?  I would be interested in knowing: What actually happened?  What are you doing so that it doesn't happen again?  Is there anything I can do differently to avoid being affected?

I would appreciate a little more transparency around these service outages, and I suspect other merchants would as well.  By my count, there have been 3 major Authorize.Net outages so far in 2014, which seems to be far above your normal average.  These outages have caused me and my staff countless hours in reconciliation and support effort.  I'm sure I could contact your Customer Service but, if you have an outage, my opinion is that I shouldn't have to come to you - you should be coming to us with as much transparency and information as you can provide.

Thank you for your consideration.

-Michael Klett

[npiasecki]

I agree, I can confirm the issue occuring around 5:01 p.m. Eastern on 6/2.

At the request of customer service, I opened a support ticket about this issue at that time, which is still unanswered 23 hours later.

I've raised complaints about transparency in the past via the ticket system, particularly after the poorly handled First Data outage in July 2013.

[moklett]

Note that there was another major outage lasting from Sept 18 11:02pm EST until Sept 19 5:49am EST.

http://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/Integration-and-Testing/CIM-Timeout-Issue-as-of-11-PM-ES...

As of now (Sept 19 9:55am EST) there is still no known acknowledgement from Authorize.Net.  The reports are that Customer Support is unaware that there was an issue, let alone why there was an issue.

[moklett]

Hallelujah. Thank you, Authorize.Net. Now, please make sure that enough people in the company...

a) know about it

b) have the ability to update it

c) actually do update it when there is an issue

... and your merchants will applaud you.

[RichardH]

Thanks @moklett  We've been working hard on this.

In case others missed the announcement, you can check system status at http://status.authorize.net.

Richard

[pksafety6]

Last night we got two 'capture error' warnings at 2:04 and 2:05 am PDT. No checkouts worked after 10:49 pm last night, when we usually would have had activity until about 1 - 3 am quiet time.

But, nothing about problems got posted on https://status.authorize.net/  until 6:04 am PDT.

Even now, 3.5 hrs after the initial post, still no good update.

Don't they have a clue about whether the issue's hardware or software?

Isn't some human or system checking status overnight? Could we get more detailed posts about the issue? Having this many issues this month is not inspiring confidence in A.Net among our senior management.

[mike_fleisher]

We've had intermittent problems all week and nothing has appeared on the status page.

I've also been told that there's a planned TLS update tonight, which will almost certainly result in some downtime... has this been posted somewhere?

Are there planned times for this event?

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