et lux in tenebris lucet

There was an electrical fire this morning at Fisher Plaza in Seattle (“the only mission-critical business community in the Northwest” according to their Google search summary as fisherplaza.com is down) resulting in a full outage. The news reports a vault fire, while another source on NANOG says generator transfer switch fire. Could be both as they’re without power at this point. Anyway, one of the affected parties was the well-known credit card processor authorize.net which apparently had a full halt on transactions when the Fisher Plaza equipment went offline.

Here’s what auhtorize.net had to say about the outage on their twitter account:

Uh, no you certainly don’t have redundancy. If it’s not working it’s not “fully redundant”. Period. Yes, you have an alternate site you’re trying to bring online, but it’s obviously not redundant.

UPDATE: A more detailed list of companies affected by the Fisher Plaza outage.