When Chargebee 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 Chargebee specifically.
How do I confirm Chargebee is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Chargebee status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Chargebee's own status page at status.chargebee.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 Chargebee outage look like?
- Chargebee hosted checkout and customer portal pages fail to load or return errors
- API calls to create subscriptions or customers return 5xx errors or time out
- Expected renewal invoices and charges do not appear on schedule
- Chargebee webhooks stop arriving at your endpoints
- The Chargebee admin console is unreachable or erroring
What breaks in your store
A Chargebee outage breaks new subscription signups because hosted checkout pages and API-driven checkout calls fail, even though the underlying payment gateway may be fine. Scheduled renewal charges, invoice generation, and dunning retries can be delayed until the platform recovers. Customers also lose access to the self-service portal, so plan changes, cancellations, and card updates pile up as support tickets, and webhooks to your store stop arriving, leaving order and entitlement data out of sync.
For context, StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 1 major Chargebee incident in the last 90 days, with an average duration of 2 hours 48 minutes. Details are on the Chargebee reliability page.
What to do during the outage
- Check status.chargebee.com to confirm the incident and identify which components are affected.
- Queue new signup requests on your side and replay them against the Chargebee API once it recovers.
- Tell customers requesting plan changes or cancellations that you will apply them manually and honor the request timestamp.
- Verify your payment gateway directly for any charges that may have processed even though Chargebee did not confirm them.
- After recovery, review the webhook event log in Chargebee and replay any missed events to resync your store.
Frequently asked questions
Will my customers' subscription renewals be skipped because Chargebee was down?
No, renewals are generally delayed rather than skipped. Chargebee processes the pending renewal charges and invoices once service is restored, so expect a burst of renewal activity and webhooks after recovery rather than lost revenue.
My store did not receive Chargebee webhooks during the outage. Is my data now wrong?
Possibly, since entitlement and order updates depend on those events. Chargebee keeps a log of webhook events and retries failed deliveries, so check the event log after recovery and manually replay anything that never reached your endpoint.
After the outage
Once Chargebee 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 Chargebee 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 Chargebee'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 Chargebee reliability page and current status on the Chargebee status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Chargebee 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.