Updated September 4, 2026. Prices, plans and features are as published on each vendor's own site on that date and may change.
There are three ways to get notified when Stripe or Shopify Payments has an outage: subscribe to the vendors' own status pages (status.stripe.com and shopifystatus.com), use a status-page aggregator such as StatusGator or IsDown, or use StatusBird, which checks both status pages every 2 minutes and alerts by SMS, email, Slack, Teams or Discord. Stripe also emails every account a health alert when it detects a spike in 402 or 500 errors on your own integration, which is worth switching on whichever route you choose.
Which notifications do Stripe and Shopify offer themselves?
Stripe status page. status.stripe.com has a Subscribe button offering email, SMS, Slack, RSS and webhook notifications for incidents Stripe declares. It is free and it is the official record, so it belongs in every setup. Its limit is timing: a vendor status page reflects an incident once the vendor has confirmed it, which can be some time after the first declined payments.
Stripe health alerts. Per Stripe's health alerts documentation (checked September 4, 2026), every Stripe account receives Basic tier alerts by email and in the Workbench Health tab when Stripe sees elevated 402 errors (payments declined because of a partner outage) or 500 errors (failed requests because of a Stripe outage) on that account. Accounts on Stripe's Growth, Premium or Enterprise support plans get the Advanced tier, which adds webhook events plus latency, integration-error and anomaly alerts. An account administrator opts in or out under Settings, then Communication preferences. Because these alerts are computed from your own traffic, they can fire for a problem specific to your integration and can stay quiet during a broad incident that has not yet reached your checkout.
Shopify status page. shopifystatus.com reports nine components (Admin, Checkout, Storefront, API and Mobile, Point of Sale, Reports and Dashboards, Third party services, Support, Oxygen) and has a Subscribe to Updates button. Shopify Payments is not listed as a separate component: payment incidents are reported under Checkout. Shopify Payments also runs on Stripe's infrastructure, so a Stripe payments incident can hit Shopify Payments before Shopify's page reflects it. Subscribing to both pages closes that gap; StatusBird's Shopify Payments status page reads the Checkout component and links to Stripe's status side by side.
What does a status-page aggregator add?
An aggregator such as StatusGator or IsDown subscribes to hundreds of vendor status pages on your behalf and forwards the changes to one inbox, Slack channel or dashboard, so you do not manage a separate subscription per vendor. StatusGator lists a free plan for 3 monitored services and a Starter plan at $79/month for 25, per StatusGator's plans page; IsDown lists a Starter plan at $27/month for 15 monitors with a 14-day trial and no free plan, per IsDown's pricing page (both as published in July 2026). Both are built for IT teams with large vendor lists. Their catalogs are broad; the trade-off for a store is per-monitor pricing and alerts written for engineers rather than for someone deciding whether to pause ad spend.
How does StatusBird notify you about a Stripe or Shopify Payments outage?
StatusBird polls status.stripe.com and Shopify's status feed every 2 minutes, along with 82 other e-commerce services, and treats any change in the vendor's indicator as an event. On the Pro plan ($29/month per the pricing page) an alert goes out by SMS, email, Slack, Teams or Discord within that 2-minute cycle, with a short note on what the incident means for a store and what to do while it lasts. Component pages for Stripe Checkout, the Stripe API, Stripe webhooks and Shopify Payments show the vendor's component-level status live.
Two free routes exist as well. The Stripe status page on StatusBird has an email alert form that needs no account and emails you when Stripe enters a major or critical outage and again when it recovers. A free StatusBird account monitors one service with a live dashboard and a day-after incident digest; it does not send real-time alerts, which is the main thing the free plan leaves out.
What does a Stripe or Shopify Payments outage look like at checkout?
- Shoppers reach the payment step, enter a card, and the page errors, spins, or returns a generic "something went wrong" message. Product pages and the cart keep working, so the store looks healthy from the outside.
- New orders stop appearing in Shopify admin while sessions and add-to-carts look normal. This gap between traffic and orders is often the first thing a store owner notices.
- Some payment methods fail while others succeed. During a Stripe-side incident, Shopify Payments card transactions can fail while PayPal or a third-party gateway keeps working, and wallet buttons can disappear from checkout.
- Payments succeed but confirmations lag. When Stripe webhooks are delayed, the charge goes through and the order shows up minutes or hours later, which produces duplicate orders when shoppers retry.
- The Stripe dashboard, payouts and refunds slow down or time out for your team, even when checkout is unaffected.
What should you do during a payment outage?
- Confirm which vendor it is. Check status.stripe.com and shopifystatus.com (or their StatusBird pages) so you know whether cards, Shopify Checkout, or everything is affected.
- Pause paid ads. Every click you buy during a payment outage lands on a checkout that cannot take money. Resume when the vendor posts a resolution and a test order succeeds.
- Put up a banner. A one-line notice in the theme's announcement bar ("Card payments are temporarily unavailable, please try again shortly or use PayPal") cuts support tickets and stops shoppers assuming your store is broken.
- Enable an alternative gateway. If PayPal, Shop Pay Installments or another processor is already set up under Settings, then Payments, make it visible. Setting one up during an outage is usually too slow, which is the argument for doing it now.
- Log the window. Note the start and end times. You will need them to reconcile duplicate or pending orders afterwards and, for accounts with an SLA, to file a credit claim.
- Reconcile after recovery. Search for orders created in the window with pending payment, refund duplicates, and email shoppers whose payment failed with a link back to their cart.
The step-by-step version, with the Shopify admin paths, is in what to do when Stripe goes down, and the difference between the two payment stacks is covered in Shopify Payments vs Stripe during an outage.
Which setup should a store use?
Subscribe to both vendor pages and turn on Stripe health alerts regardless; they are free and official. If you monitor many vendors and have an engineer reading the alerts, an aggregator suits. If you want a text message within 2 minutes that says card payments are failing and ads should be paused, that is what StatusBird Pro is built for. Whatever you choose, route the alert to a channel that interrupts you, and send yourself one test alert so the first real one is not also the first test.
Frequently asked questions
Does Stripe notify me when it has an outage?
Yes, in two ways. Anyone can subscribe to incident notices on status.stripe.com by email, SMS, Slack, RSS or webhook. Separately, every Stripe account receives Basic tier health alerts by email and in Workbench when Stripe detects elevated 402 or 500 errors on that account, per Stripe's health alerts documentation.
Does Shopify have a status page for Shopify Payments?
Not as a separate component. Shopify Payments incidents are reported under Checkout on shopifystatus.com, and because Shopify Payments runs on Stripe, status.stripe.com is the second place to check. StatusBird's Shopify Payments status page reads Shopify's Checkout component and links to Stripe's status so both are visible together.
How quickly can I be notified of a Stripe outage?
Vendor status subscriptions notify you when the vendor declares the incident. StatusBird checks status.stripe.com every 2 minutes and sends Pro alerts within that cycle, so the delay after Stripe posts is at most a couple of minutes. No monitoring tool can alert before the vendor acknowledges an incident on its status page, other than Stripe's own health alerts, which are computed from your account's traffic.
StatusBird is not affiliated with Blimey, UptimeRobot, Pingdom, Uptime.com, Better Stack, StatusGator or IsDown. Product names are used to identify the products only. Nothing here is a criticism of those tools; they are built for different jobs.