The CardCoins Status Page
100% uptime is a fundamental ideal for every website. Unfortunately it is not always achievable, even for CardCoins. Only three weeks ago AWS experienced a massive outage at its US-EAST-1 datacenter which caused widespread disruptions for some of the most popular sites on the internet. CardCoins was also affected.
This sort of downtime is classified as an “upstream failure” because CardCoins is a consumer of Amazon Web Services. Issues with infrastructure providers like AWS encompass one type of upstream failure, but it’s not the only one. Another source of upstream failures we encounter here at CardCoins are the gift card program managers themselves. For example, CardCoins recently observed degraded authorization performance from cards administered by Incomm, the firm behind popular gift cards sold under the AmEx and “Vanilla” family of brands.
To better alert customers to CardCoins service disruptions of all kinds, we have published a status page with six primary categories. The first two titled “Website” and “API” are related to general availability. These categories cover unplanned upstream and internal failures as well as any scheduled maintenance.
The last four status categories (Blackhawk Network, Greendot, Incomm, and US Bank) are named after the largest gift card program managers. They are expandable sections which list the most common gift card BINs we receive. A BIN, short for Bank Identification Number, is the first 6-8 digits of the number on the front of your gift card. It specifies the card organization (Visa, Mastercard, or American Express) as well as the card issuer. If you see an active outage associated with your gift card’s BIN, we are most likely temporarily unable to accept it. You can and should use this information to try to avoid buying gift card brands which are experiencing ongoing or recent issues. It is worth noting that Incomm cards have now become the worst performing of all BINs on an authorization attempt volume adjusted basis.
You can always see more information about incidents by reading the Incident Reports detailed at the bottom of the status page. Be sure to keep up with our Twitter for updates about service incidents and other helpful items.
Downtime happens. It’s not often, but when it does, we appreciate your understanding and patience while we work to resolve the issue. Please contact us if you have any questions.