I work at Stripe. We're back up now. Your customers can safely retry any failed payments. We'll post a public postmortem over the next few days with more information.<p>If you need any help, please drop us a line at support@stripe.com (and feel free to CC me; I'm michael@stripe.com).
"Elevated error rates" is now status page speak for "shit is totally down". Amazon does the same thing with a small note next to a green check when their api is also broken. I wonder what hellscape on earth would be necessary for amazon to drop to a red icon.
What I'm about to say is definitely NOT IN ANY SENSE Schadenfreude, but...<p>I get really excited when amazing services we've come to take for granted goes down. I'd put places like Amazon, Netflix, Gmail, etc in this category. The reason? Well, I really really look forward to reading the post-mortems and getting a sneak-peek at the inner workings of said services.
For payment processing, I've built in a system which uses stripe (credit cards only) and bitcoin (using a different API. But that is only to detect whether payment has received. If the API is down, the detection of payments can still be done manually thanks to the fact that the bitcoin network is decentralized).<p>I never rely on a single point of failure. And of course, always good to have a "plan B" in place.
No better time than Christmas to have your payment platform go down :(. I can't imagine the clusterfuck at the Stripe offices atm. Overnighters ahoy!