It’s hard to anticipate all the things that can go wrong with your software. Today one of the only times in recent memory, Authorize.net went down. Fiber lines were cut to their data center and transactions were cut-off and terminated.
If you were impacted by this then you understand the frustration of having a completely operational site that can’t complete orders. All you see is a sudden stop in orders with no discernible clue as to why it happened.
Update: Internet fiber cut impacting Internet traffic to our data center. Currently working to re-route traffic.
— Authorize.Net (@AuthorizeNet) October 8, 2014
Most shopping carts weren’t setup to handle such an outage and no errors were sent or alerts fired. Everything looked fine and the blank response from Authorize.net could easily be interpreted as a declined transaction.
Canary is setup to watch your store for changes in order velocity. If your payment gateway is down, it may be hard to know and the only way you can tell is by losing orders. Canary can help you detect the issue early on and send you a text message so you can either switch to a backup processor or give your gateway a call.
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