First, confirm it is actually Adyen and not your store. Then contain the damage and communicate. Here is exactly how to do that during a Adyen outage, plus what usually breaks and how long incidents tend to last.
How do I confirm Adyen is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Adyen status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Adyen's own status page at status.adyen.com. If the official page still shows green, do not assume you are wrong: vendors often acknowledge incidents well after they start. If both look clean, the problem is more likely your store's configuration or a specific integration.
What does a Adyen outage look like?
- Customers report card declines or payment errors at checkout despite valid cards
- Checkout spinner hangs or times out at the payment step
- Sudden drop in completed orders while site traffic stays normal
- Adyen Customer Area dashboard slow or unreachable
- Refunds and captures stuck in a pending state
What breaks in your store
An Adyen outage hits the most critical point of your store: payment authorization. Customers can fill their carts and reach checkout, but card and wallet payments fail to authorize, time out, or return gateway errors, so orders cannot complete. If Adyen also powers your in-store terminals, physical card payments fail at the same time. Refunds, captures, and payout processing through Adyen are also delayed until service recovers.
For context, Adyen has had no major incidents in the last 90 days of StatusBird's independent monitoring (100.0% availability), so a real outage is unusual. That makes it easy to mistake one for a problem on your end, which is why confirming first matters.
What to do during the outage
- Check status.adyen.com to confirm the outage and which payment methods or regions are affected.
- Temporarily enable an alternative payment method not routed through Adyen, such as PayPal, if your platform supports it.
- Add a banner at checkout telling customers payments are temporarily unavailable and inviting them to retry shortly.
- Capture failed-checkout customer emails so you can invite them back with a recovery message once payments work.
- Hold refund and capture operations until Adyen recovers rather than retrying repeatedly and risking duplicates.
Frequently asked questions
Does an Adyen outage affect my checkout?
Yes, directly. If Adyen is your payment gateway, customers cannot complete card or wallet payments while it is down, even though the rest of your site works. Any payment method routed through a different provider, such as a standalone PayPal integration, may still function.
Were customers charged for orders that failed during the Adyen outage?
Usually not, because a failed authorization means no charge went through, but some customers may see temporary pending holds from attempted authorizations. Those holds normally drop off automatically within a few days. After recovery, reconcile your Adyen transaction list against your store orders to catch any payments that succeeded without creating an order.
After the outage
Once Adyen recovers, verify the affected workflows end to end rather than trusting the status page. Note the start and end times while they are fresh: if you are on a paid Adyen plan with an SLA, documented downtime is what a service credit claim is built on. See how to claim SLA credits for the process.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Adyen'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 Adyen reliability page and current status on the Adyen status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Adyen 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.