When there are service outages at Authorize.Net, it seems that the only place the outage is acknowledged is on Twitter.  For example, there was an "issue ... affecting some merchants" ackowledged yesterday on Twitter: https://twitter.com/authorizenet/status/473571248551624704

We process a large number of transactions via your service, and can tell pretty clearly when the issues start and end.  For yesterday's incident (June 2 2014), we observed that it began around 3:15pm EST and ended around 5:47pm EST.

The "official" acknowledgement came at 5:05pm EST (almost 2 hours late), while the announcement that the issue was resolved came 19 hours later at June 3 12:13pm EST (about 18.5 hours late - https://twitter.com/authorizenet/status/473860001350836224).

I would like to know the following:

• Is Twitter the official channel for status and outage reports from the company?  Or should we be looking somewhere else?
• Do you have plans to make these reports more timely?
• Do you have plans to include more helpful information in these reports?  I would be interested in knowing: What actually happened?  What are you doing so that it doesn't happen again?  Is there anything I can do differently to avoid being affected?

I would appreciate a little more transparency around these service outages, and I suspect other merchants would as well.  By my count, there have been 3 major Authorize.Net outages so far in 2014, which seems to be far above your normal average.  These outages have caused me and my staff countless hours in reconciliation and support effort.  I'm sure I could contact your Customer Service but, if you have an outage, my opinion is that I shouldn't have to come to you - you should be coming to us with as much transparency and information as you can provide.

Thank you for your consideration.

-Michael Klett