Is Stripe Down? How to Monitor Stripe's Status Automatically (And Alert Your Team)

Stripe is core payment infrastructure for a lot of online businesses — and like any large platform, it occasionally has incidents. Payment degradations, API slowdowns, webhook delays, checkout disruptions. When these happen, your customers notice quickly. Unless someone on your team is watching or subscribed, you find out from them.

The only official channel is status.stripe.com — a page you have to visit manually and remember to check. This guide covers how to monitor it automatically and build a proper alerting system around Stripe incidents.

How to check if Stripe is down right now

The definitive source is status.stripe.com. (StatusMirror's most recent check is also shown on our Stripe status page.) Stripe's status page lists components including:

• Stripe API
• Stripe Dashboard
• Checkout
• Radar (fraud detection)
• Billing
• Connect
• Webhooks

Stripe uses Atlassian Statuspage (now Atlassian Status) to publish incidents. Each component shows one of four states: Operational, Degraded Performance, Partial Outage, or Major Outage.

The problem with manual checking: by the time you think to check, your customers are already experiencing the issue — and possibly already filing tickets.

How to get automatic Stripe outage alerts

There are three approaches to automatic Stripe status monitoring:

Option 1: Stripe's built-in email subscription (limited)

At the bottom of status.stripe.com, you can subscribe to email updates. Stripe sends emails when incidents are created, updated, and resolved. This is better than nothing — but it only reaches whoever subscribed, and only once the incident has been posted.

Option 2: Poll the Statuspage API directly

Stripe's status page exposes a JSON API at https://status.stripe.com/api/v2/status.json and /api/v2/components.json. You can build a cron job that polls this endpoint every few minutes and triggers an alert when any component leaves "operational" status.

This is effective but requires:

• Maintaining cron infrastructure (or paying for it)
• Writing and maintaining the alerting code
• Handling edge cases (API rate limits, transient failures, duplicate alerts)

Option 3: Use a dedicated third-party status monitoring tool

Tools like StatusMirror are built specifically for this. They poll Stripe (and the rest of a 150-provider catalog) every 15 minutes, de-duplicate alerts, and send email notifications when a status change is detected (email alerts are included on paid plans).

What to do when Stripe is down

Having a runbook for Stripe incidents prevents chaotic triage. Here's what a good response workflow looks like:

1. Confirm via status.stripe.com — is the component affecting your use case (Checkout? API? Webhooks?) actually degraded?
2. Post a status update to your in-app banner and help center widget so customers see it before filing tickets
3. Alert your support team via Slack/email with the status and a canned response they can use
4. Pause non-critical payment flows if your architecture supports it — retry queues, deferred billing attempts, etc.
5. Monitor the resolution and send a post-incident summary to affected customers

Setting up a Stripe status widget on your help center

The single highest-leverage thing you can do is surface Stripe's current status directly on your help center or support page. When a customer's payment fails and they come to your help center to file a ticket, they immediately see: "Stripe: Degraded performance — we're aware."

Most customers won't file a ticket if they understand the problem is upstream and you're aware of it.

With StatusMirror, adding this to any webpage is two lines:

<div id="status-mirror" data-org="your-org-id"></div>
<script src="https://statusmirror.tech/embed/v1.js" defer></script>

The widget refreshes on its own and shows the latest check for each provider you monitor. StatusMirror checks providers every 15 minutes, so it reflects the most recent check rather than a live feed.

Common Stripe incidents and what they mean for your product

API degraded performance: Stripe API calls are slower than usual or intermittently failing. Retry logic on your backend should handle most of this transparently, but checkout conversion rates will drop.

Webhook delivery issues: Stripe webhooks are delayed or missing. This affects post-payment flows: subscription activations, license provisioning, invoice generation. Have a reconciliation job that can reprocess events from Stripe's event log.

Checkout/Payment Links degraded: Stripe-hosted checkout pages are loading slowly or failing. Your conversion rate will be impacted. Consider surfacing an in-app alert for users about to start a purchase flow.

Radar issues: Fraud detection is degraded. Some payments may not be evaluated correctly.

How often does Stripe go down?

Stripe publishes its incident history on status.stripe.com — review it for the components you actually depend on (API, Checkout, Webhooks) rather than relying on a single headline uptime number. Stripe distinguishes between "operational," "degraded performance," and "partial/major outage," and partial degradations are the ones most likely to affect your customers without an obvious full outage.

Monitoring Stripe status automatically — and communicating proactively when incidents occur — is one of the highest-ROI operational investments a SaaS team can make.

Set up free Stripe status monitoring →