Payment processing is the one dependency where downtime converts directly to lost orders. Over the 180 days ending July 2026, Stripe and PayPal both ran clean: 100% uptime, zero major or critical incidents. Square is the outlier: 99.39% uptime (B grade) on the strength of a single incident that lasted more than 17 hours, one of the longest single incidents StatusBird recorded across all 84 monitored services in the window.
The numbers, side by side
| Metric (180 days ending July 2026) | Stripe | PayPal | Square |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uptime (major/critical incidents) | 100% | 100% | 99.39% |
| StatusBird reliability grade | A+ | A+ | B |
| Major or critical incidents | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Total downtime | 0 minutes | 0 minutes | 1,030 minutes |
How these numbers are measured: StatusBird checks each service's status every 2 minutes, around the clock. The uptime figures below count major and critical incidents over the 180 days ending July 2026; brief degraded periods are tracked but excluded from the uptime math so that chronically noisy status pages do not distort the comparison. Full details on the methodology page.
How reliable is Stripe?
Zero major incidents in this 180-day window, though a clean half-year is not a guarantee: Stripe's February 2026 incident disrupted checkouts for Shopify stores and is written up in the Stripe February 2026 outage post. Live history is on the Stripe reliability page, with a longer view in is Stripe reliable.
How reliable is PayPal?
PayPal matched Stripe in this window: no major incidents, 100% uptime. See the PayPal reliability page and is PayPal reliable for its longer history, plus what to do when PayPal goes down for the response playbook.
How reliable is Square?
Square's single incident produced 1,030 minutes of downtime, over 17 hours. For a payment processor that many sellers use as their only rail, an incident that long is a full lost selling day. Details and current status are on the Square reliability page and in is Square reliable.
What should stores actually do with this?
Two things. First, offer a second payment method: stores with PayPal or Shop Pay alongside card checkout keep taking orders when the primary rail fails. Second, monitor your processor independently: official payment status pages are historically slow to acknowledge incidents while checkout is already failing, and every minute of unnoticed payment downtime is unrecoverable revenue. Estimate your own exposure with the downtime cost calculator.
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