What to Do When Braintree Goes Down (and How to Know It's Them, Not You)

A Braintree outage is not something you can fix, but how you respond in the first 15 minutes decides how much it costs you. This guide covers confirming the outage, limiting the damage, and keeping customers informed.

How do I confirm Braintree is actually down?

Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Braintree status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Braintree's own status page at status.braintreepayments.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 Braintree outage look like?

• Customers report card declines or spinner hangs on the payment step of checkout
• Braintree API calls return 5xx errors or time out in server logs
• The Braintree control panel is slow, erroring, or unreachable
• Recurring subscription charges fail in a batch around the same time
• Refunds and captures issued from the store admin return gateway errors

What breaks in your store

When Braintree goes down, checkout stops converting: card authorizations fail or time out, so customers cannot complete purchases even though the rest of the store loads normally. Stored-vault charges and recurring billing runs fail, and any Venmo or PayPal transactions routed through Braintree fail with them. If the outage affects only the API and not the gateway, orders may sit in a pending or unsettled state, and refunds or captures issued from the admin will error until service returns.

For context, Braintree 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

1. Enable a backup payment option such as PayPal Standard or Shop Pay that does not route through Braintree.
2. Check status.braintreepayments.com to confirm the outage is on Braintree's side before debugging your integration.
3. Add a checkout banner telling customers card payments are temporarily unavailable and to retry shortly.
4. Log failed checkout attempts with customer emails so you can invite those shoppers back once payments recover.
5. Hold off on issuing refunds and captures from the admin until the gateway confirms recovery, then verify each transaction settled only once.

Frequently asked questions

Will customers be double charged if they retried their card during the Braintree outage?

Usually not, because a failed authorization means no charge was created. The risk is requests that timed out after Braintree accepted them, so once service recovers, reconcile your order list against the transactions in the Braintree control panel and refund any duplicates.

Do I lose the sales that failed during a Braintree outage?

The transactions themselves are gone, but the shoppers often are not. Capture emails from failed checkout attempts and abandoned carts, then send a recovery email with a direct checkout link once payments are working again.

After the outage

Once Braintree 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 Braintree 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 Braintree'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 Braintree reliability page and current status on the Braintree status page, or browse all 84 service grades.

Know before your customers do

StatusBird monitors Braintree 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.