Payment system down

[denise]

The payment system is currently unavailable due to an extremely unhelpful error from our payment processor that can't be resolved until their business hours, which had (of course) ended for the day by the time the error started happening. (I mean, it literally says "an unexpected error". So very helpful, folks.)

Depending on the cause of the error, the failed payments may or may not complete successfully once we resolve it with them. We'll update you when we know which, and if they do complete successfully and you tried to make multiple payments because of the failure and didn't intend to make all of them, give you instructions on how to contact us to get that cleared up.

We apologize for the inconvenience!

Comments

[lightrings]

Thank you for letting us know. Wow what an unhelpful error.

[mildred_of_midgard]

That error message is pretty much this recent xkcd comic.

[azurelunatic]

New and innovative problems! Yaaaay!!

[vakkotaur]

That message always has me wondering what all the expected errors are.

[xanthipe]

From a developer perspective, Unexpected error" means "it should never be possible to reach this stage but I'm going to put in proper error trapping just in case". The xkcd referenced in an earlier comment is more accurate than we'd care to admit ;)

[mindstalk]

Some of them are user errors: "you entered bad data".

Some of them can be environmental errors: "cannot reach a service we depend on". A service (like a database) might be unreachable due to being on a different machine and network partition, or it might have crashed, or be down for maintenance, etc. Or a machine might run of memory or disk and now the process can't do its job.

Some of them can be complexity errors, especially with large codebases worked on by multiple people (or the same person over a long time): "someone is invoking this code incorrectly, or passing in bad parameter values". So kind of like user error but for internal 'users'.