First, confirm it is actually Plaid and not your store. Then contain the damage and communicate. Here is exactly how to do that during a Plaid outage, plus what usually breaks and how long incidents tend to last.
How do I confirm Plaid is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Plaid status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Plaid's own status page at status.plaid.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 Plaid outage look like?
- The Plaid Link widget fails to open or shows a connectivity error
- Customers report their bank login fails or hangs inside the connect flow
- Pay-by-bank or ACH payment options error at checkout
- Financing or BNPL applications stall at the bank verification step
- Plaid API calls return elevated error rates in your logs
What breaks in your store
When Plaid goes down, any checkout or signup flow that asks customers to connect a bank account fails: Plaid Link will not load, bank logins error out, or specific bank integrations return connection errors. Pay-by-bank payment options stop working entirely, and BNPL or financing approvals that depend on Plaid verification can stall or decline. Card payments are unaffected, so the blast radius depends on how much of your checkout runs through bank connections. Note that Plaid outages are sometimes limited to specific bank integrations rather than the whole platform.
For context, Plaid 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.plaid.com to see whether the whole platform or only specific bank institutions are affected.
- Steer customers to card payment or another available method while bank connections are down.
- Offer manual bank verification via micro-deposits if your integration supports it, accepting the day-or-two delay.
- Hide the pay-by-bank option temporarily if failures are widespread, to avoid abandoned checkouts.
- Have customers retry after recovery, since failed link attempts do not usually leave accounts in a broken state.
Frequently asked questions
Customers cannot connect their bank at checkout. Is it my integration or Plaid?
Check status.plaid.com first; Plaid publishes institution-level incidents, so the problem may be limited to certain banks like Chase or Bank of America rather than your code. If the status page shows an incident matching customer reports, no change on your side is needed. If it is clean, then investigate your own API keys and integration.
Is customer bank data at risk during a Plaid outage?
An availability outage means connections and data requests are failing, not that data is exposed. Customers simply cannot complete the bank linking step. Once Plaid recovers, they can retry the connection normally without needing to reset anything.
After the outage
Once Plaid 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 Plaid 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 Plaid'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 Plaid reliability page and current status on the Plaid status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Plaid 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.