The short answer: recharge is reliable overall but not incident-free: StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 99.96% availability with 1 major incident totaling 46 minutes of downtime in the last 90 days.
Below is the data behind that answer and how Recharge compares to its peers.
What is Recharge?
Recharge is a subscription management platform for e-commerce, dominant among Shopify stores selling subscribe-and-save products like coffee, supplements, and consumables. It handles recurring billing schedules, charges customers on each renewal, creates the recurring orders in the store, and provides a customer portal where subscribers can skip, swap, pause, or cancel. For subscription-first brands it effectively is the revenue engine.
Recharge uptime and outage history
| Metric (90 days, as of August 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Availability | 99.96% |
| Reliability grade | A+ |
| Major incidents | 1 |
| Total major-outage downtime | 46 minutes |
| Average incident duration | 46 minutes |
| Most recent major incident | July 20, 2026 |
| Checks in window | 61,485 |
Among the 4 subscription billing services StatusBird monitors, Recharge ranks number 3 for 90-day availability. See the full ranking of subscription billing tools by reliability.
What happens to your store when Recharge goes down?
When Recharge goes down, scheduled recurring charges may fail to process or be delayed, and the renewal orders they create stop flowing into your store, so fulfillment of subscription shipments stalls. The customer portal becomes unavailable, meaning subscribers cannot skip or manage upcoming orders, which tends to produce a wave of support tickets and, if skips fail before a billing date, angry customers charged for boxes they meant to skip. New subscription signups through Recharge-powered widgets at checkout can also fail while one-time purchases continue normally.
This pattern is not unique to any one vendor. The Uptime Institute's Annual Outage Analysis has found year after year that a growing share of serious outages originate with third-party and cloud providers rather than in-house systems, and that most significant outages now carry six-figure costs.
Typical symptoms during a Recharge outage:
- Subscriber portal login or management pages fail to load
- Expected recurring charges do not appear at their scheduled time
- Renewal orders stop being created in Shopify
- Subscription options or widgets vanish from product pages
- Recharge API and webhook errors appear in integration logs
If you are in the middle of an incident right now, see what to do when Recharge goes down for a step-by-step playbook.
Frequently asked questions
Recharge missed today's billing run. Will my subscribers be charged twice when it recovers?
Recharge queues delayed charges and processes them after recovery rather than skipping or doubling them in normal cases. Watch your charge logs after the incident clears and spot-check a few subscribers to confirm one charge per renewal. Contact Recharge support if you see duplicates rather than refunding at scale immediately.
A customer could not skip their order because the portal was down and got charged. What do I do?
Refund or cancel that renewal proactively and tell the customer you did so. Fighting a subscriber over a charge they tried to prevent is how you lose the subscription entirely. Keep a list of affected customers during the outage so support can resolve them in one batch.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Recharge'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 Recharge reliability page and current status on the Recharge status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Recharge 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.