Authorize.net is one of the Internets oldest and largest payment gateways and when it goes down every site out there that uses them can’t processes transactions.

It seems that a problem with their electrical service  took out their Seattle Washington offices at around 11 am EST and they do not expect to be up until 5pm EST.

Although it may seem like an inconvenience this is really a serious situation for a huge number of website owners.

Many Companies that use Authorize.net for their payment gateway are lucky that it happened on a holiday weekend and sales were expected to be less then average but then again if you are serving a niche customer base or visitors that are outside of the USA you could be missing out on a lot of income.

This brings up the question of why anyone would depend on a single service.

Authorize.net being down for even a few hours should spark a flood of signups for paypal and google next week.

We will continue to monitor the situation and let you know how things work out.