Why am I getting this WSDL SOAP error with authorize.net?

Question

I have my script email me when there is a problem creating a recurring transaction with authorize.net. I received the following at 5:23AM Pacific time:

SOAP-ERROR: Parsing
WSDL: Couldn't load from 'https://api.authorize.net/soap/v1/service.asmx?wsdl' :
failed to load external entity "https://api.authorize.net/soap/v1/service.asmx?wsdl"

And of course, when I did exactly the same thing that the user did, it worked fine for me.

Does this mean authorize.net's API is down? Their knowledge base simply sucks and provides no information whatsoever about this problem. I've contacted the company, but I'm not holding my breath for a response. Google reveals nothing. Looking through their code, nothing stands out. Maybe an authentication error?

Has anyone seen an error like this before? What causes this?

Answer 1

Maybe as a back up you can cache the WSDL file locally and in case of network issues use the local copy. I doubt it changes often so if you refresh it weekly that should be satisfactory as the file will probably not be stale by then.