A fire at the Seattle Fisher Plaza data center caused outages for a number of websites including Bing Travel, Microsoft's travel planning site, and Authorize.net, an important payment gateway service provider processing credit card and e-check data for online vendors.

“Last night at approximately 11:10 pm, an incident in a garage-level electrical room disrupted power to Fisher Plaza East and knocked out the facility's backup generation system. The electrical room is where Fisher Plaza East receives its power from Seattle City Light,” Fisher Communications, the company running the data center, said in a statement issued after the incident.

One of the services affected is Authorize.net, the largest credit card and e-check payment processor in the world, with tens of thousands of partners and processing millions of transactions on a daily basis. Authorize.net set up a Twitter account to keep its customers informed and transaction processing has been restored with a backup data center. ARB transactions will be rerun over the weekend thought there are still issues with CIM, VPOS and api.authorize.net.

Also affected was Bing Travel which, at the time of writing, was still unavailable even though Microsoft said it was working hard to restore the service and aimed to have it back up at 5 p.m PT. The problems aren't affecting any other Bing service and Microsoft suggests using its partner Orbitz in the meantime.

“A blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers. This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there has been no impact to any other aspects of Bing. We're hard at work to restore service following this unexpected event and appreciate your patience,” the site reads.

The cause of the fire wasn't isolated but the problems were caused by the sprinkler system, which fried the backup generators. Portable generators were deployed on the site and Fisher Communications said it was working with the Seattle City Light to restore normal operations.