Over the 180 days ending July 2026, Stripe and Braintree both ran clean: 100% uptime, zero major incidents. Authorize.net posted 99.71% (B+) with one major incident totaling 486 minutes, about 8 hours of payment disruption in the window.
The numbers, side by side
| Metric (180 days ending July 2026) | Stripe | Authorize.net | Braintree |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uptime (major/critical incidents) | 100% | 99.71% | 100% |
| StatusBird reliability grade | A+ | B+ | A+ |
| Major or critical incidents | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Total downtime | 0 minutes | 486 minutes | 0 minutes |
How these numbers are measured: StatusBird checks each service's status every 2 minutes, around the clock. Uptime counts major and critical incidents over the 180 days ending July 2026; brief degraded periods are excluded so chronically noisy status pages do not distort the comparison. Full details on the methodology page.
How reliable is Stripe?
Clean in this window, though not immune historically: the February 2026 incident that hit Shopify checkouts is written up in the Stripe February 2026 outage post. Ongoing history: Stripe reliability page and is Stripe reliable.
How reliable is Authorize.net?
One 8-hour incident in six months is significant for a payment gateway: that is a full business day of degraded checkout for affected merchants. Details on the Authorize.net reliability page.
How reliable is Braintree?
Zero major incidents in the window. As a PayPal company, Braintree also pairs naturally with PayPal wallet acceptance. History: Braintree reliability page.
The takeaway for stores
Payments is the category where downtime converts one-to-one into lost orders. Whichever gateway you run, two mitigations matter more than the brand choice: a second payment method at checkout, and independent monitoring so you hear about gateway degradation from an alert, not from a customer email an hour later. Estimate your exposure with the downtime cost calculator.
Start monitoring your stack free with StatusBird: 1 service, no credit card required. Pro is $29/month for all 84 services with SMS, email, Slack, Teams, and Discord alerts within 2 minutes of a status change.