Updated October 28, 2026. Uptime, incident and honesty figures are StatusBird's own readings over the 90 days ending on that date; live values are on the linked status pages.
To check whether Stripe is down right now, open StatusBird's live Stripe status page, which answers yes or no at the top and shows when the state last changed, or go to Stripe's own page at status.stripe.com. If both say operational and your checkout is still failing, the problem is on your side of the integration, not Stripe's. Over the 90 days ending October 28, 2026, StatusBird recorded no major or critical Stripe incident at all, which is why Stripe holds an A+ reliability grade; so when a checkout fails, the odds favour a local cause.
Where do I check if Stripe is down right now?
There are three places, and they answer slightly different questions.
- Stripe's status page (status.stripe.com) is the vendor's own account. It is authoritative when it shows an incident, but vendors post incidents after they have confirmed them internally, so it lags the first failed charge.
- An independent monitor such as statusbird.io/status/stripe reads Stripe's status page every 2 minutes and records the result, so you can see not just the current state but when it changed, how long the last incident lasted, and the 90-day history. It also lists the other services in your stack on the same screen, which matters because a checkout can fail when Stripe is fine and your platform, tax or fraud tool is not.
- Your own Stripe dashboard. Open Payments, filter to the last 15 minutes, and look at declined and failed charges. A run of failures with the same error code points at a Stripe-side problem; a mix of normal declines points at ordinary card behaviour.
How can I tell a Stripe outage from a problem in my store?
Run the three checks in this order. First, the status pages above: if either reports an incident affecting the API or Checkout, stop here. Second, a test payment in test mode from your own storefront: if test mode works and live mode fails, Stripe's live API is the likely culprit. Third, your platform's status: Shopify Payments, WooCommerce hosting, or whatever runs the cart. StatusBird shows those on the same status board, and in the 90 days to October 28 Shopify logged two major incidents while Stripe logged none, so the platform is the more common failure point.
What should I do while Stripe is down?
Keep the store open and change what customers see. Switch on an alternative payment method you already have configured, such as PayPal or Shop Pay, so a shopper who cannot pay by card still can. Put a one-line notice on the checkout page rather than the homepage; people only need to know at the moment it affects them. Pause paid ads that send traffic to checkout until the incident resolves, because that spend converts to nothing. Afterwards, Stripe's incident report will state the window; compare it with your order timeline, and if you have a Business plan or above on StatusBird the SLA claim assistant drafts the credit request from the measured minutes.
How do I get told before customers tell me?
Set up an alert instead of a bookmark. StatusBird's free plan watches one service, Stripe if you like, and emails a next-day digest; Pro ($29 a month, 7-day trial with no card) sends SMS, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams or Discord alerts within 2 minutes of a change, covers all 88 services StatusBird monitors, and checks your own checkout URL too. Alerts that land on a phone are the difference between a 4-minute outage and a 40-minute one.
StatusBird checks every monitored service every 2 minutes and keeps every reading. Availability counts major and critical incidents only. The honesty grade is the mean number of minutes between a vendor's status page first showing a major or critical problem and the vendor posting an incident about it, graded A (under 15 minutes) to F (4 hours or never).
FAQ
Is Stripe down right now?
Check statusbird.io/status/stripe for the live answer; it is re-read every 2 minutes and states the time of the last reading. This article cannot be live, but the status page is.
Why does Stripe's status page say operational when my payments are failing?
Because the vendor posts an incident after confirming it, and because many checkout failures are not Stripe's: an expired API key, a webhook endpoint returning errors, a platform outage, or a fraud rule blocking a batch of cards all look like "Stripe is down" from the customer's side.
How often does Stripe go down?
In StatusBird's readings for the 90 days ending October 28, 2026, Stripe had zero major or critical incidents, giving it an A+ reliability grade. Stripe runs its own status page rather than a standard incident feed, so StatusBird does not publish an honesty grade for it.
What is the fastest way to find out when Stripe goes down?
An alert on a channel you cannot miss. StatusBird Pro sends SMS within 2 minutes of a status change; the free plan sends a next-day email digest.