A Recurly 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 Recurly is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Recurly status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Recurly's own status page at status.recurly.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 Recurly outage look like?
- Checkout or signup forms using Recurly.js fail to tokenize cards
- Hosted payment and account management pages return errors
- Expected renewal invoices and charges do not appear on schedule
- Recurly webhooks stop arriving at your endpoints
- The Recurly admin console is slow or unreachable
What breaks in your store
When Recurly goes down, new subscription signups fail because the hosted payment pages or Recurly.js checkout tokenization stop working, and scheduled renewal billing can be delayed. Webhooks that tell your systems about successful renewals, cancellations, and failed payments stop arriving, so downstream provisioning and fulfillment can drift out of sync with billing reality. Dunning retries pause as well. Existing subscriber access is usually unaffected in the short term; the immediate revenue hit is blocked new signups.
For context, Recurly 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.recurly.com to confirm which components (API, hosted pages, webhooks) are affected.
- Capture signup intent with a fallback form and email follow-up so blocked subscribers can be converted after recovery.
- Do not manually re-run charges during the incident; Recurly processes delayed billing after recovery and manual runs risk duplicates.
- Rely on Recurly's webhook redelivery or reconcile via API queries after recovery instead of assuming missed events are gone.
- Grace-period any access or fulfillment cutoffs tied to renewals so paying customers are not locked out over delayed billing.
Frequently asked questions
Renewals due today have not billed because Recurly is down. Is that revenue gone?
No. Recurly processes billing that was delayed by an incident once service is restored, so renewals typically bill late rather than never. Reconcile invoice counts against your subscriber base after recovery and raise any stragglers with Recurly support.
My app depends on Recurly webhooks. How do I recover the events I missed?
Recurly retries failed webhook deliveries automatically for a period, and you can also resend notifications from the admin console or reconcile by querying the API for recent transactions and subscription changes. After recovery, run a reconciliation pass rather than trusting that every retry landed.
After the outage
Once Recurly 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 Recurly 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 Recurly'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 Recurly reliability page and current status on the Recurly status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Recurly 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.