Braintree has been highly reliable recently: StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 100.0% availability and zero major incidents over the last 90 days.
Numbers alone do not tell you whether to worry, so this post also covers what actually breaks when Braintree has problems and how to get warned early.
What is Braintree?
Braintree is a payment gateway owned by PayPal that processes credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay for online businesses. E-commerce stores integrate it through hosted fields, drop-in UI components, or server-side SDKs to authorize and capture payments at checkout. It also handles recurring billing, stored payment methods in its vault, and fraud screening.
Braintree uptime and outage history
| Metric (90 days, as of July 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Availability | 100.0% |
| Reliability grade | A+ |
| Major incidents | 0 |
| Total major-outage downtime | 0 minutes |
| Average incident duration | n/a |
| Most recent major incident | None in the last 90 days |
| Checks in window | 45,546 |
Among the 11 payment processing services StatusBird monitors, Braintree ranks number 4 for 90-day availability. See the full ranking of payment processing tools by reliability.
What happens to your store when Braintree goes down?
When Braintree goes down, checkout stops converting: card authorizations fail or time out, so customers cannot complete purchases even though the rest of the store loads normally. Stored-vault charges and recurring billing runs fail, and any Venmo or PayPal transactions routed through Braintree fail with them. If the outage affects only the API and not the gateway, orders may sit in a pending or unsettled state, and refunds or captures issued from the admin will error until service returns.
Typical symptoms during a Braintree outage:
- Customers report card declines or spinner hangs on the payment step of checkout
- Braintree API calls return 5xx errors or time out in server logs
- The Braintree control panel is slow, erroring, or unreachable
- Recurring subscription charges fail in a batch around the same time
- Refunds and captures issued from the store admin return gateway errors
If you are in the middle of an incident right now, see what to do when Braintree goes down for a step-by-step playbook.
Frequently asked questions
Will customers be double charged if they retried their card during the Braintree outage?
Usually not, because a failed authorization means no charge was created. The risk is requests that timed out after Braintree accepted them, so once service recovers, reconcile your order list against the transactions in the Braintree control panel and refund any duplicates.
Do I lose the sales that failed during a Braintree outage?
The transactions themselves are gone, but the shoppers often are not. Capture emails from failed checkout attempts and abandoned carts, then send a recovery email with a direct checkout link once payments are working again.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Braintree'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 Braintree reliability page and current status on the Braintree status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Braintree 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.