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, a company backed by
Microsoft founder
Paul Allen, 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 in 2007. 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 (DDoS) attack. The DDoS attack lasted for over one week and caused a virtual shut down of the
payment gateway's service. The attackers demanded money from Authorize.net in exchange for stopping the attack. On July 2, 2009, at 11:00 p.m. PST, the entire web infrastructure for Authorize.Net (main website, merchant gateway website, etc.) went offline and stayed down all morning July 3, 2009. 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. ==Services==