Actinic Payments server down

[cbarling]

Here is the promised update on last weeks outage.

Two simultaneous and unrelated hardware failures caused an interuption to Actinic Payments between 11.30 and 12.06 and 12.15 and 12.22 on Thursday 14th May, 2009.

The systems architecture is designed to cope with these types of problem. However, manual intervention is required at this level of failure. An urgent review is being conducted to ensure that a recurrence would not lead to an outage in the future.

Since November 2005, the only unscheduled unavailability of the underlying Creditcall platform has been this 43 minutes and total scheduled unavailability has by co-incidence also been 43 minutes. Combined, this has provided an availability of 99.996% over nearly four years.

Actinic would like to apologise to anyone effected by the outage. We have high hopes that this will not occur again for many years.

Chris

[wesleythorne]

many thanks
keep up the good work on the uptime

i been trying to pay my vat bill on the governments site but there server has been down all day, you would think they have a bigger budget, i did call them but they said it will be sorted as soon as but no idea when, very blas ay!

[guccij]

i been trying to pay my vat bill on the governments site but there server has been down all day

Direct Debit is your friend

[djferros]

Does anyone have any problems with AP since yesterday 18:00?
Every single order of mine has not gone through.... and is stuck in the pending payments section folder. Customers are emailing me about it as well.

[starleisure]

Hi

I called Actinic this morning and I didnt find them very professional the staff do not seem to know whats going on (meanwhile we are losing business)

I even phoned credit call direct and they are not aware of any problems their end.

Mr Barling ar you able to update us ??

Simon

[djferros]

I called Actinic this morning and I didnt find them very professional the staff do not seem to know whats going on

the exact reason why i didn't renew my support countract this year, just seemed pointless.
________
Verona

[johnshackleton]

Same problem here. All orders are going into 'pending payment service provider' with no payments attached.

However, if you go online and log-on to AP Account Admin, all the payments are there and all appear okay.

Seems they just haven't attached to the order and the customers (and us on MOTO) are getting the declined page.

Actinic say they are aware of it and will let us know when its fixed.

[JGLIGHTING]

hi
Just to add our bit 2 of our orders are went into psp pending one at 19.30 and the other at 22.30. Both order are in the admin site so we can commit to the payment on there.

Not Good

[cbarling]

I can only apologise.

This problem started last night and ended this morning. It impacted a subset of merchants and stopped the successful callback to the merchant's web site, so payments should have been taken despite the error message.

It's important to check for duplicate payments, as some customers clearly saw an error message, although it's not yet clear if all did.

This is clearly not good enough, and appears to be down to a monitoring failure.

I will post a fuller explanation when I have it.

Chris Barling
CEO, Actinic

[Rich Brady]

Chris,

Would the problems effect the Fraud score at all. A client has an order, 3 declined payments, one processed, but Actinic is showing a red "Held" status and a score of +40.

Could this be attributed to the previous failed attempts?

[wesleythorne]

we to have problems, i have 3 pending payments and checking in admin all payments received.

Now do i manually add a payment or wait for the payment to download.
If I add a payment manually when i next download if the payments come in I will have 2 payments.

wes

[Mike Hughes]

I would manually add the payment. If a callback has already failed it's extremely unlikely that the system will try again.

Worst case, you might get a duplicate payment that you can cancel later. But unless you manually make the payments you won't be able to process the orders.

Mike

[Darren]

Chris,

Would the problems effect the Fraud score at all. A client has an order, 3 declined payments, one processed, but Actinic is showing a red "Held" status and a score of +40.

Could this be attributed to the previous failed attempts?

Can we have the transaction ID please, I would suggest emailing this to me at dlsupport [at] actinic [dot] co [dot] uk so we can investigate further.

Thanks

[Rich Brady]

I got Mick to send you a mail Darren.

Could you CC me in the reply please?

Cheers,

Rich

[pisaia]

the exact reason why i didn't renew my support countract this year, just seemed pointless.

I couldn't agree more. First I was told there was a power cut and when I said I thought there were 4 servers I was informed that there was only one and that it was in the UK.

No one knew what they were talking about and I requested to be informed when it was working and 4 hours later I'm still waiting. Thankfully I used my initiative and did some test orders and have now turned my PPC back on.

My only hope is that this "100% uptime" figure which is quoted everywhere is amended, as it doesn't seem like this is the first time it's happened.

Looking at our systems it seems to have been caused problems for 14 hours. We have had some customers charged 7 times due to them retrying which is totally unacceptable and it seems that if this problem had happened on a Friday then it wouldn't have been fixed till Monday.

I was made aware at 10pm and was able to stop PPC e.t.c so I am absolutely flabbergasted that it's taken Actinic till this morning to find out.