This morning tens of thousands of ecommerce retailers awoke to see that their credit card processing company (authorize.net) went down due to a fire in the Seattle office.

Unfortunately, going down means no credit cards can be processed by many merchants who rely on authorize.net for their sales. This shows you that you should always have a back-up plan ready to go, such as PayPal or Google Checkout. This can save you thousands of dollars in headaches.

I personally witnessed a company lose hundreds of orders and receive tons of phone calls from irate customers vowing to never shop at this ecommerce site again.

When will the site be back up? It’s been 10 hours so far and still no word of any expected recovery time. Hopefully, this will be resolved and everyone can process the orders they have been hand writing down for the past ten hours.

Hopefully someone in the internet marketing department can resolve this problem in a timely manner.