Question: What could be changing our order status?

This afternoon, we had nearly a dozen orders that were Authorized, but later switched the order status back to Unauthorized somehow. How could this happen?

• It was many orders within a short (1 hour?) time period, but not all of them. Interspersed were some orders that were fine.


• The orders used multiple payment processors, both Auth.Net and PayPal. So, it wasn't weird communications from one of them.


• They all looked like completed orders. We received both the cart's "Order complete" email and the email from the respective payment processor. The admin had the correct Auth number in the field. It just didn't show Authorized anymore.


• After manually changing them to Authorized (and hitting Update!), they switched back some minutes later. All of the orders at once. We tried several times to update it. It would update, show it was updated, but switch back again several minutes later. Always the same specific orders.


• Looking in our admin right now, all of them show all dozen orders were Unauthorized at 19:50 UTC. This is as much as an hour or more after the original order completion time. How would all of them have been switched to Unauthorized at once?


• Since that time, it seems to have stopped for now.

I've looked through logs and can't seem to find anything suspicious. What possible things can we look for that might have caused this? I'm running out of ideas for things to check.

Thanks for any ideas!

Hi

I wonder if it is database related ie your database resetting to an hour before or something like that? I haven't heard of it happening and don't see why it should happen but it would cause any changes you made made to to be set back to an earlier state.

Andy

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Yeah, not a bad idea. I didn't see anything strange like that in the logs, though. Plus, other orders interspersed with those didn't change their status or the status-modified time-date field.

Also weird was how the changeback happened multiple times.

I really want to say it feels like some kind of weird communications thing between the cart and the payment processor, but it's too coincidental that it happened with both Auth.Net and PayPal orders to blame that.

Though we're sometimes going as long as a week without errors, this error keeps happening in our store. It's also getting more dangerous for us -- today we had an order that we manually cancelled that magically went back to Authorized. We caught it, but could have accidentally shipped product to someone for an order they cancelled.

Any other ideas we should check? I'm not sure where to suspect this is coming from. Even if you have broad, unsubstantiated guesses, we'd love to hear them!

We're still on 6.4.8, so we're going to consider updating. I don't know that it would solve anything, but it's usually high on the list of "tech support" answers!

I've also been looking at the server, seeing if anything weird is there in error logs, SQL stuff, etc. Nothing obvious has turned up yet.

This might be a bit off the wall but I've seen drop down menus change in the past in some browsers when the mouse wheel is used to scroll down the page - not something I've seen recently but it couldn't be that, could it?

Andy

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