This is a true testament to the stinge-factor of financial services companies. Those fucktards at authorize.net* put all their eggs in one basket and kept their entire infrastructure in a single datacenter. In which there was a fire. And now they’re gone.
What the hell are they thinking? They process countless millions of transactions and they can’t afford to put their machines into more than one datacenter? I’m going to go out on a limb here and make the assumption that their backups were also hosted in the same DC and that they have in-house engineers who sleep in cots in the DC’s conference room. I’d blame this on their engineers, but it’s really their C-level technology person’s fault for having the same amount of forethought about his company’s wellbeing as my dog has about where on my yard he’s going to poop.
I have clients, mostly small companies, who have more complex infrastructures than that. They make hundreds of times less than these clowns per year and still manage to have two copies of everything in more than a single location because spending a few hundred bucks now saves, well, their entire livelihood. I just don’t understand how a company of its size is even going to try and justify this to their soon-to-be-rapidly-shrinking customer base.
The real problem is this: my holiday weekend, along with many others in my business, is now going to be a holy hell. Instead of pulling together in a crisis and answering the phones, authorize.net has decided to allow their employees to stay home on the long weekend and not worry about the elephant in the room. They’re not even taking calls! Can you believe this? And now my clients and customers are calling and blaming ME for their customers’ transactions not going through. Until about an hour ago, I didn’t even have an answer why, I had to find out from the article I linked above. That’s just wrong.
Anyway, I just wanted to take a minute and vent. Now I have to go back to answering phone calls and emails, because I am a responsible professional with more than two active brain cells.
Fuck you, authorize.net. I’m taking my business, and that of my customers, out of your inept hands. You should be ashamed and embarrassed, I hope you go broke and I get to not put anything in your cup when you’re begging for change on Skid Row.
* If you don’t know who these jagoffs are, they are responsible for processing credit card transactions for many thousands of online businesses. They have been around since the 90’s and are recommended by many small-business bankers because of their middle-of-the-road pricing and generally fair merchant support.