After AviTron reported Gloebit payment problems on Saturday, other grids also seem to be having the same issue. Today, Gloebit confirmed that there’s an issue.
“It appears that starting Sep. 27, some grids had some notifications of completion of transaction not make it back to the grid,” Gloebit CEO Chris Colosi said in a Facebook comment earlier today. “It looks like our service couldn’t call back into the grid to notify it.”
As of this writing, Colosi has not responded to Hypergrid Business requests for comment.
It’s not clear yet what is causing the issue.
“We haven’t changed the Gloebit service recently,” Colosi said in the Facebook comment. “The only thing I’m aware of is that the old Let’s Encrypt root certificate expired,” he added.
The Let’s Encrypt issue also took out Foxtrot Breedables and other services in Second Life last week.
“We do use LetsEncrypt. If you have a very old system, you may need to update it or install an updated root certificate,” Colosi said in another Facebook comment earlier to
“If a grid server hadn’t been updated in a long time, it might reject our connection as untrusted,” he said. “However, this issue looks like it started on Sep. 27, not Sep. 30.”
Several commenters also reported problems, on both Linux-based and Windows-based OpenSim grids.
“Multiple grids have the issue described above,” said Facebook user Bonnie Stewart. “Payments can be made, but there is no message that it succeeded and the recipient is not notified. If an item is involved it is not delivered. However the transactions do show if you look at your Gloebit account.”
I had the same experience.
Earlier today, I traveled to several different grids where I made Gloebit purchases at different malls from different merchants. In each case, the amount debited from my Gloebit account. However, none of the purchases made it to my inventory. I visited DigiWorldz, Dynamic Worldz, The Kaz Grid, and Mobius Grid.
Meanwhile, I was able to collect freebies from other grids without any issues.
“Direct payments are working, also payments through objects like tip jars or vendors,” said Facebook user Christian Descho. “But vendors do not get the info that the item can be delivered.”
As of Sunday night, DigiWorldz owner Terry Ford hadn’t heard of anyone having problems like I did.
“We have not heard of any issues on our end,” he said.
He could see from the log files that there were no errors when my avatar arrived on the region. “So from a log file point of view, all looks well.”
In addition, tracking down the issue could be tricky.
“We don’t have access to the backend systems of Gloebit, therefore we have no way to troubleshoot any issues,” he said. “I’ve lost faith in Gloebits on my end and so have many other users.”
Meanwhile, AviTron, the grid that first reported the problem to Hypergrid Business, is increasingly getting frustrated with the lack of response from Gloebit.
“I have made the decision to change AviTrons currency to Tron$,” AviTron grid owner Alex Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “I will study Podex but for now it will be Tron.”
When the Gloebit system last has a major outage, this past spring, several grids considered rolling out their own currency, or using the Podex currency system.
However Gloebit is the only platform that supports multi-grid shopping in an easy way. No other currency has been able to do the same.
You can follow Gloebit on Facebook here.
One possible alternative, at least temporarily, is for merchants to switch to the Kitely Market as a payment and delivery mechanism.
“Kitely Market continues to deliver orders to other OpenSim grids without issue, as it did the last time the Gloebits system was down,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.
The way it works is that merchants can link their in-world vendors to the Kitely Market listings for those products, so that customers can buy them online and have them delivered directly to their avatars. Kitely already delivers to hundreds of OpenSim grids, including closed grids. Merchants can even link to specific variations of a product, Tochner said.
That way, merchants don’t have to lose sales from hypergrid visitors while the payment issues are being resolved.
“It’s always good to have a backup and Kitely Market has a good track record when it comes to enabling people to easily sell their creations to people from multiple grids with very little issues,” he said.
Grids that aren’t currently in the Kitely Market shopping cart’s default list can help their residents to easily add their grid as a delivery option by following these instructions.
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