Authorize.Net, A Visa Solution is a United States-based

payment gateway A payment gateway is a merchant service provided by an e-commerce application service provider that authorizes credit card or direct payments processing for e-businesses, online retailers, bricks and clicks, or traditional brick and mortar. The p ...

service provider, allowing

merchant A merchant is a person who trades in commodities produced by other people, especially one who trades with foreign countries. Historically, a merchant is anyone who is involved in business or trade. Merchants have operated for as long as indust ...

s to accept

credit card A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...

and electronic check payments through their

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

and over an

Internet Protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. IP h ...

(IP) connection. Founded in 1996 as Authorize.Net, Inc., the company is now a

subsidiary A subsidiary, subsidiary company or daughter company is a company owned or controlled by another company, which is called the parent company or holding company. Two or more subsidiaries that either belong to the same parent company or having a s ...

Visa Inc. Visa Inc. (; stylized as ''VISA'') is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded cred ...

Its service permits customers to enter credit card and shipping information directly onto a web page, in contrast to some alternatives that require the customer to sign up for a payment service before performing a transaction.

History

Authorize.Net was founded in 1996, in Utah, by Jeff Knowles. As of 2004, it had about 90,000 customers. Authorize.Net was one of several companies acquired by

Go2Net Infospace, Inc. was an American company that offered private label search engine, online directory, and provider of metadata feeds. The company's flagship metasearch site was Dogpile and its other notable consumer brands were WebCrawler and Meta ...

, a company backed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

founder

Paul Allen Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, and philanthropist. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation with childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which h ...

, in 1999, for 90.5 million in cash and stock. Go2Net was acquired by InfoSpace in 2000 for about $4 billion; Authorize.Net was acquired by Lightbridge in 2004 for $82 million and then by

CyberSource Cybersource is a payment service provider founded in 1994. In November 2007, Cybersource acquired the U.S. small business payment services provider Authorize.Net for $565 million. On April 22, 2010, Visa Inc. acquired Cybersource for $2 billion ...

in 2007.

acquired CyberSource in 2010 for $2 billion. Visa has maintained Authorize.Net and Cybersource as separate services, with Authorize.Net concentrating on small- to medium-sized businesses and Cybersource concentrating on international and large-scale payment processing. At the time of the 2010 acquisition, the company's CEO identified three priorities: expanding the ecommerce market, enhancing fraud detection and prevention, and improving data security. As of 2014, along with parent CyberSource, it had about 450,000 customers.

Outages

In September 2004, Authorize.Net's servers were hit by a

distributed denial-of-service In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

(DDoS) attack. The DDoS attack lasted for over one week and caused a virtual shut down of the

's service. The attackers demanded money from Authorize.net in exchange for stopping the attack. On July 2, 2009, at 11:00 pm PST, the entire web infrastructure for Authorize.Net (main website, merchant gateway website, etc.) went offline and stayed down all morning July 3, 2009.Fire disrupts stations at Seattle's Fisher Plaza
Friday, July 3, 2009 at 9:42 AM,

Seattle Times ''The Seattle Times'' is a daily newspaper serving Seattle, Washington, United States. It was founded in 1891 and has been owned by the Blethen family since 1896. ''The Seattle Times'' has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Washington st ...

None of the over 200,000 merchants who used Authorize.Net payment gateway at the time were able to process credit cards. Authorize.Net's phone numbers were closed July 3 because of the July 4th holiday as previously announced on their website (though the website was down at the time). Other companies that have nearby offices have reported to the media that there was a fire. Authorize.net started a

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

account that morning, but did not update their phones to give notice to customers until July 5 when they reopened phones.

Services

Authorize.Net processes

card Card or The Card may refer to: * Various types of plastic cards: **By type ***Magnetic stripe card *** Chip card *** Digital card **By function ***Payment card ****Credit card **** Debit card ****EC-card ****Identity card ****European Health Insur ...

and ACH payments for companies from small and medium-sized merchants. It offers fraud protection services, recurring billing subscriptions, and simple checkout options. For developers, it provides an

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...

(API) and

software development kit A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific to ...

s for Android and iOS. Its virtual terminal and invoice features can process manual payments. It also offers recurring billing and a plugin for the integration with Authorize.Net, and technical support is available for merchants. Authorize.Net has the most customers of any payment processor and has been described as one of the more senior players in the payment processing industry, retaining a "decent portion" of the industry's market share.

References

{{Reflist Visa Inc. 1999 mergers and acquisitions 2004 mergers and acquisitions 2007 mergers and acquisitions 1996 establishments in Utah 2007 disestablishments in Utah Companies based in Utah American companies established in 1996 American companies disestablished in 1999 Computer companies established in 1996 Computer companies disestablished in 1999 Defunct computer companies of the United States Financial services companies established in 1996 Financial technology companies Merchant services Online payments

History

Outages

Services

See also

References