
Stripe's API was down again - klinskyc
Hasn&#x27;t hit their status page yet,  but our error rates are spiked up again, and they just posted a tweet -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.stripe.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.stripe.com&#x2F;</a><p>5:35 Eastern -&gt; Their status page has been updated
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tibbon
Stripe gets the front page because they are popular with developers, but I've
dealt with so many other more-corporate payment processors that are absolutely
_awful_ for reliability. Rampant downtime, terrible support, terrible
concurrency limits, failure to meet SLAs, terrible documentation (900 page
specs that are impossible to read). They all think they are awesome, and yet
can't go more than 48 hours without having some system degradation email sent
out. I don't want to name them, but they are some of the worst businesses I've
ever dealt with. They just want to sit there and collect huge amounts of money
for helping you connect to Visa/Mastercard/etc, and do little else.

Rage. Stripe hitting a little downtime is nothing in comparison.

~~~
drspacemonkey
I dealt with one that seemed actively hostile. They would change their API
without any advance warning at all. Data fields that we depended on would
mysteriously vanish in the middle of the day, causing our entire system to
grind to a halt until we put in a hotfix. Happened several times in the two
years I worked on that project.

~~~
october_sky
Wow?! An API should be treated as a contract.. I hope you dropped them

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drspacemonkey
It would have been nice if dropping them had been an option for me.

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edwinwee
We're seeing a spike in error rates and we're working on a fix now. (We've
updated our status page:
[https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1149065544399609856](https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1149065544399609856))

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rglover
Kind of incredible that this is the first time I remember Stripe being down in
a long, long time.

Serious kudos to their team and hope they get this resolved soon :)

~~~
civicsquid
I've seen a lot of comments like this on HN since earlier today regarding the
Stripe API downtime. It's very positive and I'm glad to see it in response to
an event that usually garners frustration.

Never used Stripe's API myself, but it sounds like they are vastly reliable
beyond these blips.

~~~
jammygit
Out of curiosity, why is this downvoted?

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dmlittle
It would be great if Stripe would offer an RSS feed for status updates in
addition to twitter posts. A lot of other services have one and it's very
convenient to subscribe to in Slack for updates. At my current company, for
example, we have a #third-party-outages channel which we have all available
third party services (GitHub, NPM, CircleCI, Slack [yes, it's meta],
HackerOne, etc.) status page RSS feed notify in case of an outage.

~~~
jammygit
I didn’t realize you could use slack as an rss client

~~~
ComputerGuru
Via a bot.

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harrygallagher4
Ran into this one in the wild when it happened, before stripe status had even
tweeted about it. I was trying to order doordash and got a "Could not
deserialize JSON object" error when adding a credit card. Hope this is fixed
soon, the girlfriend and I are very hungry :(

Edit: update if anyone cared, API seems back up and we have ordered food! :)

~~~
egty
I care! What did y'all get? Was it tasty?

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dang
The thread from earlier today is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403774).

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cristea
The last error message on their credit cards endpoint reads «This API method
has been temporarily disabled due to exceptionally high traffic». It might be
a DDoS attack.

~~~
edwinwee
We're investigating what happened, but we know this wasn't a DDoS attack.

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slics
Is it due to another Fiber Cut somewhere? Recently almost the entire east
coast was down due to fiber damage. I guess the cloud services are as good as
the wires that run in the ground.

~~~
jxramos
grounding the cloud!

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jasonb05
Bad day to launch my new GAN book. damn it!

~~~
how_77462348
I was able to still get through and get it.

~~~
jasonb05
Thanks!

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sauldcosta
Yep, definitely is. Have been getting 503s for the last 15 minutes.

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paulmendoza
Second time today. This has been a painful day. That uptime percentage is
really ticking down fast. The developer/test mode APIs also seem to be down
now as well.

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duxup
Anyone have any good advice on storing a failed transaction and retrying
later?

Is that even feasible with Stripe?

Obviously there would be security considerations.

~~~
ComputerGuru
The real solution is to never rely on one party. We fall back to another
payment processor after using a heuristic to see if the error isn’t one that
makes sense. If it’s a problem with the payment card, it’ll fail again, no
harm done. If it’s a problem with the provider, it’ll go through.

(We wrote a payments abstraction library easy enough to (partially or fully)
fill for any payment provider’s core functionality, so it’s literally just a
couple more lines of code at the call site. It took several rewrites to get
the abstraction to cover all the oddities each time we added a new provider
implementation, though!)

~~~
maxgashkov
But for that you have to touch CC info directly with all the risks and
compliance bullshit.

~~~
dangrossman
You can use a third party vault to collect and store CC info without it
touching your servers. I use Spreedly. I can then charge any of the stored
cards with any of like 45 different payment gateways, including Stripe.
Keeping your own billing systems online when one of your gateways is down is
one of the use cases. This has worked great for the past 7 or so years I've
been using them. It might become more difficult with PSD2 SCA however...

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athrun
what happens when the vault goes down?

~~~
dangrossman
That happens much less often than payment gateways going down. Spreedly's
service is at least an order of magnitude less complex than running a payment
processing company. However, you can have resilience against that situation by
having a backup integration with one of your payment gateways directly.
Spreedly will gladly collect a customer's credit card for you, save it in
their vault, AND save it in your Stripe account, and any other gateways you
work with. So, without having touched any CC info yourself, you can tell
Spreedly to charge a customer via Stripe, or you can directly tell Stripe to
charge that same card.

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fbelzile
It looks like it's up again for me.

~~~
pgm8705
I've had transactions getting through every once in a while but most are not.

~~~
foobiekr
SAAS: if one transaction gets through, it’s not “down” or “unavailable”, it’s
“elevated error rates.”

