TechieGroups

A powerful earthquake struck off the coast of Haiti this afternoon, according to the USGS.

Powerful M7.3 Earthquake Hits Haiti

The earthquake, preliminarily recorded as magnitude-7.3… but later adjusted to 7.0… was reported at 1:53 p.m. Pacific Time.

The epicenter of the quake was located inland, six miles west of Carrefour, close to the capital Port-au-Prince and was only 20.5 miles deep.

A major earthquake, of magnitude 7 or higher, is capable of causing widespread and heavy damage.

According to the Associated Press, a hospital in Petionville in Haiti has collapsed and people are screaming for help.

A tsunami watch is in effect for Haiti, Cuba, The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic.

A fire in Seattle’s Fisher Plaza appears to have taken down Authorize.net, a service used by online businesses to process credit card and electronic check payments.

That’s a big problem for any Authorize.net customer, since this basically means they can’t accept payments through their websites until the service is up again. I’m told this affects both one-time and recurring payments. With its website down, Authorize has set up a new Twitter account to provide updates and address the many customer complaints and questions. Many of the tweets can be boiled down to, “The team is working hard to get things running again, but I don’t have a timetable”; the company is also trying to reassure customers, “yes we have fully redundant data center” (sic), and also just said, “Transactions are up except for Global processing and Concord. No ETA on those, but we are working on in.”

As a lot of e-commerce businesses and Twitter users are noticing, the entire Authorize.Net infrastructure crashed a few hours ago. For anyone who makes a purchase online, this is huge; Authorize.Net is the largest service for accepting credit cards and e-checks through the web. This means that millions of web-based transactions and purchases have come to a halt.

Luckily, Authorize.Net understands the usefulness of social media in situations like these. They set up a new Twitter (Twitter) account, @AuthorizeNet, earlier today to keep users informed about the recovery of one of the web’s most important payment systems. So what took Authorize.Net down anyway? And when will it be 100% back?

Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours, a number of tipsters inform us. That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites (example), it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.

It’s unclear when the downtime started exactly, but the consensus is somewhere between 5 and 7 hours at this point (11 AM Eastern), with e-commerce vendors desperately looking for ways to contact the company or get any first-hand information about what’s going on and when the problems will be resolved. Twitter, meanwhile, is buzzing with the news as the United States wakes up