PayFlow Pro down?

[UltimateNourishment]

Is anyone else having issues with PayFlow Pro? Customers checking out are getting the error message:

Unable to authorize payment: Host not available

And the Verisign PayFlow Pro manager at https://payments.verisign.com is also down.

Just wondering if it was my site? Or a more wide spread outage.

Julie

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

No, they're down, their Payflow Link gateway and manager is down too. Their customer service line is closed for the holiday and we're waiting for a call back from their partner support. I'm not sure when they went down.

[UltimateNourishment]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

Thanks David for your (always) expedient reply!

Glad to know that it isn't just isolated to my site (I am not in a troubleshooting mood today :-p)

If you hear anything, would you mind posting it here?

Thanks so much!

Julie

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

My 25 minute on hold attempt just resulted in a ring and disconnect, calling back now. :)

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

Well just heard back from them, big problem, no ETA. They'll email partners once they do have an ETA and when they're back online, supposedly.

I'd recommend everyone having this issue switch to simple validation for the time being and run the cards manually later when they're back online.

[UltimateNourishment]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

The PayFlow Pro manager is back up, but when I turned back on PayFlow Pro (from Simple Validation) and tried to process an order, I still received the "Host Not Available" error..... argh!

Sorry to hear about your automated phone/hold/disconnect! Hopefully it is painless this time around.

[Pamela Hazelton]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

This almost seems intermittent across servers. I can't get a PING on them, but just placed a test on one site and payment went through, though other sites are in fact down.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

I believe they have had ping blocked at their router/firewall since they moved it to PayPal's data center. I'm still seeing the following on their Payflow Link web page:

"Warning 4023"
Contact customer service

[Pamela Hazelton]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

And... our site's Payflow Pro just halted - was working fine.

Note to anyone who is running Simple Validation during the outage, make sure you activate MIVA's ENCRYPTION feature.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

Since this doesn't seem to be going away, here's the steps on working around it:

1) In your store's payment configuration area, check on the box that says "Credit card with simple validation"

2) On the new tab that will now appear at the top, click it.

3) Delete any card types that you do not accept.

4) Click your Payflow Pro or Payflow Link tab which should be right next to simple validation.

5) Turn OFF all card types. This will leave the module and its settings in place but will no longer be used during checkout.

At this point your store will be collecting credit card numbers, not processing them. This will allow you to take orders and then when Verisign is back up, process them manually through their web interface. When they do come back up, you'll want to turn simple validation back off but it won't let you until all the orders that were placed with it are gone from your store. So instead, you can just delete the card types from it in the same way you turned them off in Payflow; now the module itself is still there but it's not being used. Then turn your card types back on in Payflow.

To protect the customer data if you store orders for a period of time, turn on encryption under Order Processing as Pamela suggsted.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

If your simple validation is missing any card types, here's the appropriate values so you can add them back in:

Amex: "allowable prefixes" should be 34, 37 and allowable length is 15
Discover: 6011 and 16 for those same values
Master Card: 5 and 16
Visa: 4 and 16

[d_host]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

I'm on the phone with our account rep and already spoke with Premium Support minutes ago. This appears to be an intermittent problem, but based on the number of support tickets WE received, it seems to be a pretty high ratio of failed to completed transactions :-(

The good news is that only Verisign Account Manager v3 seems to be affected at this point. If you have logins to v4 and v5 systems, those are working fine - at least for manually running transactions or capturing transactions already in the system.

[sjordan911]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

How will we know when this is fixed?

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

We've been getting calls and helpdesk tickets all morning.

[d_host]

Re: PayFlow Pro down?

How will we know when this is fixed?

Check with your host to see if they have any form of notifications that they use to notify their clients about such issues. Or, keep calling Payflow support number - they have a pre-recorded message that pays first thing when the system picks up. I'm pretty sure once that message disappears or gets replaced with "everything's working" note, you'll know... ;-)