Question
We are receiving the following error message whenever someone tries to place an order in Magento:
- Gateway error: Unable to read response, or response is empty
Please help as soon as possible because this problem is preventing people from placing orders on our website!
Answer
Our initial thought regarding this problem is there was some sort of problem with Authorize.Net or merchant account. We tried in vain to update the Authorize.Net Transaction Key, but we still received an error.
We spent a lot of time looking into the code and the Authorize.Net configuration in both Magento and Authorize.Net thinking something changed, even though our GIT repository showed no coding changes have been made whatsoever.
As a last ditch effort we shutdown and restarted the Linux server running this Magento website. That did it!
We are at a bit of a loss here. Simply rebooting the server fixed the problem which rules out many of the paths we were investigating. We performed a postmortem and still could not find the root cause of this problem. Our best guess is this was some sort of problem with Magento or Apache.