Stripe's API suffered two consecutive outages yesterday causing elevated error rates and response times

Yesterday, Stripe’s API services went down twice, from 16:36–17:02 UTC and again from 21:14–22:47 UTC. Though the API services were recovered immediately after the disruptions, it caused elevated error rates and response times. Stripe has not yet specified the cause of the degradation, they have promised to share a root analysis of the issue later.

Stripe constantly updated users about the repeated degradation and recovery on Twitter. Meanwhile, Stripe users expressed their outrage on the social media platform.

https://twitter.com/OBX_Kayak/status/1149091674620080128

https://twitter.com/secretveneers/status/1138061688186576896

https://twitter.com/shazbegg/status/1138035967095390209

https://twitter.com/katetomasdphil/status/1138075917283188736

The issue started at 16.36 UTC with some Stripe payouts to GBP bank accounts being delayed.

Next, Stripe informed users that they are investigating the issue with their UK banking partner which resulted in the delay of some GBP payouts. Later, Stripe confirmed that all the affected payouts have been processed and the issue has been resolved.

Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison commented on one of the Hacker News threads, “Stripe CEO here. We're very sorry about this. We work hard to maintain extreme reliability in our infrastructure, with a lot of redundancy at different levels. This morning, our API was heavily degraded (though not totally down) for 24 minutes. We'll be conducting a thorough investigation and root-cause analysis.”

Later in the day, around 21.14 UTC, Stripe informed users that their error rates and response times have again increased. Finally their API services were restored at 22:47 UTC. Stripe assured users that all the delayed bank payments have been successfully deposited to the corresponding bank accounts.

Though many users were distraught over Stripe’s service degradation, some users came out in support of Stripe.

https://twitter.com/macrodesiac_/status/1138072815603769348

https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1149079993437380608

A user on Hacker News comments, “This is causing a big problem for my business right now, but I am not mad at Stripe because you earned that level of credibility and respect in my opinion. I understand these things happen and am glad to know a team as excellent as Stripe's is on the job.”

Many users have asked Stripe to give a post mortem analysis about the issue.

https://twitter.com/thinkdigitalco/status/1149092661082693633

https://twitter.com/DahmianOwen/status/1149071761188589568

This month, many other services like GitLab, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Apple’s iCloud also suffered major outages.

A comment on Hacker News reads, “Most services are going down from time to time, it's just that the big one are widely used and so people notice quickly”

Another user comments, “Between Cloudflare, Google, and now Stripe, I feel like there's been a huge cluster of services that never go down, going down. Curious to see Stripe's post-mortem here.”

To know Stripe’s exact system status, head over to Stripe Status page.