When Afterpay goes down, do three things first: confirm the outage is on their side, protect whatever the outage is breaking in your store, and tell affected customers before they find out the hard way. This playbook walks through each step for Afterpay specifically.
How do I confirm Afterpay is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Afterpay status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Afterpay's own status page at status.afterpay.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 Afterpay outage look like?
- Afterpay checkout redirect fails, errors, or loops back to your cart
- Customers complain they cannot log in to Afterpay to approve a purchase
- Installment price badges disappear from product pages
- Conversion dips on orders in the typical Afterpay price range while card orders hold steady
- Afterpay merchant portal unreachable or refunds not processing
What breaks in your store
During an Afterpay outage, shoppers who pick Afterpay at checkout cannot complete the redirect and approval flow, so those orders fail or hang. The rest of your checkout is unaffected, but you lose the segment of buyers who rely on installments, and abandoned carts rise among them. Afterpay on-site messaging widgets may stop rendering on product and cart pages, and merchant-side operations like refunds through Afterpay are delayed until service returns.
For context, StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 2 major Afterpay incidents in the last 90 days, with an average duration of 14 minutes. Details are on the Afterpay reliability page.
What to do during the outage
- Check status.afterpay.com to verify the problem is on Afterpay's side.
- Post a short checkout notice that installment payments are temporarily down and cards still work.
- Suggest an alternative BNPL provider you offer, such as Klarna or Affirm, to installment shoppers.
- Collect emails from customers who want to pay with Afterpay so you can notify them when it is back.
- Queue Afterpay refunds and process them after recovery instead of retrying during the outage.
Frequently asked questions
Does an Afterpay outage break my whole checkout?
No. Afterpay is one payment option among several, so card, wallet, and PayPal payments continue working. Only customers who select Afterpay will see failures, though on-site Afterpay widgets may also stop loading.
Will I still get paid for Afterpay orders placed just before the outage?
Yes. Orders where the Afterpay approval completed and your store received order confirmation are funded by Afterpay as normal. Payouts or settlement reporting may run late during the incident, so give reconciliation a day or two after recovery.
After the outage
Once Afterpay 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 Afterpay 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 Afterpay'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 Afterpay reliability page and current status on the Afterpay status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Afterpay 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.