Authorize.net's recent woes have made Wired News. Authorize.net is a local outfit. In fact, iMall and Authorize.net had discussions about merging at one point. We had just bought PurePayment.net and had some great credit card gateway technology that eventually became the SurePay gateway. Authorize.net had lots of customers. We thought it was a match made in heaven, but it was not to be. At any rate, Authorize.net has been suffering from a DDoS attack lately and their 90,000 customers are starting to get antsy:

"I'm losing four grand a day in revenue," said David Hoekje, president of PartsGuy.com, an online heating and air conditioning parts dealer. "My year is a bell curve, and we're on the upwards slope now. This is 5 percent of my year, gone."

"We know how hard it is," said Michael Adberg, co-founder of WeaKnees.com. The site, which sells TiVo upgrades and DirecTV installations, was itself the target of a DDoS attack last October. "But we're surprised that such a large company wasn't better prepared than we were." He added, "They have really let us down.

From Wired News: Hack Attack Gums Up Authorize.Net
Referenced Wed Sep 22 2004 07:44:25 GMT-0600

Authorize.net used to be owned by InfoSpace. They were recently bought by LightBridge. LightBridge recently laid off 12% of their workforce and then these mysterious DDoS attacks started. Hmm...If I were looking, I know where I'd start. (see Stealing the Network)

Not surprisingly, the LightBridge Web site doesn't make mention of these problems and the Authorize.net page handles them with a small link that leads to a not very helpful statements. Maybe Authorize.net is connecting with their customers some other way to give them reassurance that they're handling the problem, but somehow I suspect that they're not. Like almost all company Web sites, the Authorize.net Web page continues to scream happy thoughts that in some marketer's imagination are supposed to make us want to use their service. My advice: start a blog and let a human write it. It won't solve the DDoS attacks, but it will connect to customers better.