Afterpay is reliable overall but not incident-free: StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 99.98% availability with 2 major incidents totaling 28 minutes of downtime in the last 90 days.
Here is the full picture behind that verdict, and what an outage would mean for your store.
What is Afterpay?
Afterpay is a buy now, pay later service that splits a customer's purchase into four interest-free installments while paying the merchant upfront. Online stores offer it as a checkout payment option via integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and other platforms, and typically show Afterpay installment messaging on product pages to lift conversion on mid-priced items.
Afterpay uptime and outage history
| Metric (90 days, as of July 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Availability | 99.98% |
| Reliability grade | A+ |
| Major incidents | 2 |
| Total major-outage downtime | 28 minutes |
| Average incident duration | 14 minutes |
| Most recent major incident | May 08, 2026 |
| Checks in window | 61,615 |
Among the 11 payment processing services StatusBird monitors, Afterpay ranks number 9 for 90-day availability. See the full ranking of payment processing tools by reliability.
What happens to your store when Afterpay goes down?
During an Afterpay outage, shoppers who pick Afterpay at checkout cannot complete the redirect and approval flow, so those orders fail or hang. The rest of your checkout is unaffected, but you lose the segment of buyers who rely on installments, and abandoned carts rise among them. Afterpay on-site messaging widgets may stop rendering on product and cart pages, and merchant-side operations like refunds through Afterpay are delayed until service returns.
Typical symptoms during a Afterpay outage:
- Afterpay checkout redirect fails, errors, or loops back to your cart
- Customers complain they cannot log in to Afterpay to approve a purchase
- Installment price badges disappear from product pages
- Conversion dips on orders in the typical Afterpay price range while card orders hold steady
- Afterpay merchant portal unreachable or refunds not processing
If you are in the middle of an incident right now, see what to do when Afterpay goes down for a step-by-step playbook.
Frequently asked questions
Does an Afterpay outage break my whole checkout?
No. Afterpay is one payment option among several, so card, wallet, and PayPal payments continue working. Only customers who select Afterpay will see failures, though on-site Afterpay widgets may also stop loading.
Will I still get paid for Afterpay orders placed just before the outage?
Yes. Orders where the Afterpay approval completed and your store received order confirmation are funded by Afterpay as normal. Payouts or settlement reporting may run late during the incident, so give reconciliation a day or two after recovery.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Afterpay's status every 2 minutes, around the clock, independently of the vendor. The availability figure counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded so numbers are not skewed by vendors that report small blips near-continuously. Grades run from A+ to F. See the live numbers on the Afterpay reliability page and current status on the Afterpay status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Afterpay and 83 other services online stores depend on, plus your own storefront, every 2 minutes. When something goes down you get an SMS, email, or Slack alert with plain-English context, usually before the official status page catches up. Start monitoring free, no card required for the free plan.