back to article Sage Pay suffers 2nd day of downtime

Sage's online payment service SagePay is mainly not working for its 32,000 customers today, and it wasn't really working yesterday either. There seems to be a slight discrepancy between Sage's Twitter feed and its system monitor page on its website. The company's Twitter feed warns that live processing is not working but its …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Some old story

    I really worry that its something systemic to their entire platform. This has been ongoing for months now. One downtime event after another!

    Come on... enough is enough!

  2. Daryl
    Unhappy

    Shrugs

    Mission critical, backup plan, redundancy, fail-over... we've heard of them :(

  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    System Monitor?

    Yeah, well, if you keep an eye on that you will see rather than posting a new status update when the situation changes they just edit the current one. Makes it very difficult to believe anything they say.

    With "My Sage Pay" system not showing any transactions for tday, and "Intermittent Live Transactions" it makes it near on impossible to tell if A customer has paid or not. Or if a customer has paided several times or not...

    Still I'm sure Simon will send out a mass email of sorry when it's all over, promising to improve in the future..If the good old days when it was Protx we had no issues like this at all, ever since sage took over it has been one failure to the next.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Protx was fine?

      I seem to remember quite a few problems when it was Protx too!

    2. Daryl
      Unhappy

      Protx

      Protx was exactly the same - you could set your calendar on the Xmas tits-up!

      1. CD001

        Aaaaaaaaah

        but at least you knew when the ProTX titsup was coming ;)

      2. Aaron Em

        Christmas is in March?

        What kind of calendar are you using?

  4. Ian Stewart
    FAIL

    same old story?

    "If the good old days when it was Protx we had no issues like this at all" - wrong. I moved our payment processing off Protx when they screwed up the implementation of 3D-Secure so badly that we were unable to take payments for 3days. Plus ca change...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Sage more like Sage and Onion

    Yep I moved last year from them as they were Dire. I moved to Total Web Solutions and I must say they have been great. I didn't want to move to a bank as I hate them but also didn't want to stuff up my transactions altogether so I tried someone different.

    1. j5-payne

      Finally Had Enough

      I have finally had enough with Sage Pay!

      What a joke, been messing around for 2 days and ruining my business and friends business who I suggested to them to use Sage Pay.

      I have now contacted another Payment Gateway to get this sorted. I am currently in talks with CardStream Payment gateway (http://cardstream.com/). I found these guys from recommendation actually and so far the help on the other side of the phone is great! They're also cheaper than Sage Pay which is a Bonus ! Only 6.57p a transaction instead of 7.34p !!

      Rant Over !!! Good buy Sage and Onion and hello Cardstream !

    2. j5-payne

      Finally Had Enough

      I have finally had enough with Sage Pay!

      What a joke, been messing around for 2 days and ruining my business and friends business who I suggested to them to use Sage Pay.

      I have now contacted another Payment Gateway to get this sorted. I am currently in talks with CardStream Payment gateway (http://cardstream.com/). I found these guys from recommendation actually and so far the help on the other side of the phone is great! They're also cheaper than Sage Pay which is a Bonus ! Only 6.57p a transaction instead of 7.34p !!

      Rant Over !!! Good "buy" Sage and Onion and hello Cardstream !

  6. Tamer Shafik
    Happy

    Dual gateways

    After the diabolical problems in Nov, we set up an account with IridiumCorp. We process some of our transactions through them, and some through SagePay. When we get more than 2 timeouts in a row, our system switches over automatically.

    So far (since Nov) we haven't had any timeouts on Iridium. We're keeping both gateways permanently, but processing most of the transactions through Iridium.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    At least sage and onion is useful...

    Funnily enough they sent out an email this morning:

    "The Sage Pay payment gateway is fully functional and successfully processing all transactions. However, we are still encountering some issues in populating transactions into My Sage Pay"

    I guess they were lying then? Why doesn't that surprise me?

  8. dave 46

    Protx

    Protx were so bad they implemented 3d-secure years after the rest of the payment industry when mastercard finally mandated it.

    They then screwed it up.

    I suspect it's either lack of investment or a platform which is so badly designed (and documented) they don't dare touch anything lest it blow up in their faces.

    In 5 years and 20k transactions a month we've had one failure with our processor (secure trading) and that was down to our firewalls blocking updates. They aren't all the same.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Badly designed

      "a platform which is so badly designed (and documented) they don't dare touch anything lest it blow up in their faces."

      I suspect it's largely this! Although it would help if they didn't try to do upgrades during the busy Xmas period. Knowing that something may go wrong, why risk peeing off your customers that badly?

    2. CD001

      SecureTrading

      I was looking at Secure Trading as I've seen their logo on a few sites - if they're as good as you say they are I might have to have a crack at convincing "the powers that be" that it _might_ be a good idea to switch.

  9. D_Meister_General
    Thumb Down

    Rubbish

    Is anyone accountable for the errors at Sage. This is ruining us as a small company, but their share price is not be affected.

  10. Joe 3
    Thumb Down

    Status page

    They can't even get the status page right! Currently there's a green flag and the message:

    "System Normal - Thu 03 Mar 2011 6:54pm. Live transactions are not processing - The Sage Pay gateway is currently not processing any transactions. We are working to get this resolved as a matter of urgency. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience. Please continue to check the system monitor page for further updates."

    Apparently, at SageFail, it's normal for transactions not to be processed...

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Serious problem

    Sagepay, this is really bad... compensation or I'm offski

    1. CD001

      Compensation?!?

      Hahahhaahah - they don't even offer a minimum SLA. About the best you'll get is a fake apology letter from Simon Black, MD.

  12. tintin192

    Seriously p*ssed of

    My company lost thousands of pounds today during this debacle. As other commenters have said - it's the latest in a long line of ridiculous outages. SagePay send lovely emails once every few weeks telling us about all the amazing changes they're making. Unfortunately none of them prevent this kind of thing - THE most damaging thing for merchants - when customers give up on their purchases because SagePay doesn't work.

    After such a poor record of outages, we now think that the MD of SagePay, Simon Black should resign from his job. He's had enough chances to sack the people who can't get this system to be reliable, and he should now go and let someone else do a proper job.

    Please write and tell him so - his email is just his first name @ sagepay.com

    Once you've done that - send a letter to the Chairman of SagePay's board requesting his removal.

    ***THIS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE***

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