Fortunately I happened to be in Minneapolis for business and only 6 miles away from the corporate headquarters of DR.  As I drove onto the massive campus in Eden Prairie, MN I entered what looked like a ghost town , something reminiscent of the film ’2012′. About 25 cars filled the lot of the DR headquarters. The door was locked. The lights were out.

I waited in the parking lot for around 10 minutes when I spotted an employee leaving the building.  A portly young lady walked out and I drove around and pulled up next to her,  rolled down my window and said “Any idea what’s going on? Your multi-billion dollar company has been offline for almost 36 hours… Her response was “I can’t say”.

What do you MEAN you can’t say? I mean who knows how much money has been lost in the past 3 days, I thought.

Hundreds of thousands of customers, small businesses, affiliate networks, digital stores, millions of dollars flowing through the Internet all of the sudden experienced a complete and totally abrupt halt,  apparently because of a “rare hardware malfunction”.

I thought about it for a second… Something smells ROTTEN in Denmark.

There is one word that comes to mind, being an Internet developer that word is clearly: “Redundancy”.

Had digital river possibly built this entire empire without ANY redundancy on their SAN?

That just didn’t seem possible. It’s crazy to think or even ponder the thought that this gigantic mammoth of a company Digital River was using technology that was as old as the company itself…1994. But that is exactly what it seemed. ZERO redundancy.  Just a large SAN without any off site cloud backups or redundancy.  It doesn’t make ANY sense.  It seems crazy and I’m sure that after the past 3 days…the folks over at DR are thinking the same thing. “OOOPS”.

Modern server configurations are built in the cloud, with double, triple, sometimes even 4x Redundancy for situations just like this.

In my opinion, this event was completely preventable.  This never had to happen.  Someone is going to get fired.

As of the time I am writing this article (2/26 12:16pm),  Direct Track is STILL offline.  The twitter feed is going nuts, forums are blowing up and people want answers. I’ve already got word that a very big CPA network is officially pulling out of Direct Track because of this debacle.

But…  Of all things what concerns me the most is that no public apology has been issued by Digital River.  Why is it taking so long to get DT back online?

Hardly a SAN Failure or a RARE one at that.  In my opinion, I think that DR was hacked.  SWREG was hacked previously (just do a google search) and perhaps they were hit again. With DR buying out SWREG (Originally part of CompuServe for shareware) who knows the various SQL Injections or exploits that are still live on the sites in their network. It’s time to UPGRADE…  Take some of those billions and invest it in a sound, solid and secure infrastructure that is MODERN.

This is beyond ridiculous and people want answers.

-Max