Gist: Fire at Fisher Plaza, a “mission-critical” Seattle-based datacenter and colo space. Authorize.net payment processor and others down for hours.

A fire in the Fisher Plaza facility has taken down top merchant processing gateway Authorize.net along with others. Fisher Plaza is a state-of-the-art datacenter, office space, and colo space in Seattle, WA. Authorize.net is a merchant processing gateway that provides APIs for the processing of credit cards, e-checks, transfers, and other methods of payment to its customers.

Authorize.net’s Twitter stream showed signs of recovery as the situation was rectified. Authorize.net has since restored their processing gateway for their production server. Throughout the problem, Authorize.net was quick and calm to take care of the situation, resolving it and conversing with their customers. Authorize.net payment processing was restored at 11am PST.

It should be interesting to see how the fire in what Fisher Plaza calls the “the only mission-critical business community in the Northwest combining Class A office, data center, colocation and retail space” will affect the space. The more mission-critical, the more money, the more responsibility Fisher Plaza holds in keeping service smooth. Taking down hundreds of websites and a top payment processing gateway will result in millions in lost sales for Authorize.net itself, not to mention for the other websites, not to mention damages to the facility.

It’s interesting to note, however, that Authorize.net seemed to only have one single point of weakness where it could be damaged, and it seems but one attack vector can be responsible for bringing the processing system down. Redundancy seems not to have been the case at Authorize.net.