Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled

Stripe has been pretty bad for us lately. Downtime yes, but also slashed our corporate card limits with no explanation and refused to restore them despite our bank writing letters supporting our position.<p>We&#x27;ve been with them for 10 years and their customer service is atrocious on this position, which is unfortunate since historically it&#x27;s been quite good.<p>We went through the arduous process of switching our corporate credit card structure to Stripe away from another vendor, and we probably have to go back to the other vendor now. Starting to understand the anti-Stripe comments that pop up from various people on HN.

Didn&#x27;t they just fire a bunch of people working on a tax product?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;08&#x2F;19&#x2F;stripe-layoffs-taxjar-tech&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;08&#x2F;19&#x2F;stripe-layoffs-taxjar-tech...</a>

Switched to Paddle earlier this year for other reasons, glad I&#x27;m not affected by this. Paddle is not as pleasant to work with as Stripe from a dev perspective but it also handles so much more that what I need to integrate is tiny compared to Stripe.

The issue started 5h47m ago for us. The Stripe status page is unreliable like everyone&#x27;s else status page. The Stripe API returns &quot;An unknown error occurred&quot;. The only source of information has been Twitter but it is not very credible - 3 hours ago, Stripe tweeted that the issue has been fixed just to find an avalanche of counter replies.

Did they not fire a large portion of the teams behind the tax team (acquired company)?

A temporary stop-gap solution for this (if you are using Stripe Checkout) is to disable tax calculation.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;api&#x2F;checkout&#x2F;sessions&#x2F;create#create_checkout_session-automatic_tax" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;api&#x2F;checkout&#x2F;sessions&#x2F;create#create_...</a><p><pre><code> session = stripe.checkout.Session.create( automatic_tax={&#x27;enabled&#x27;: False}, payment_method_types=[&#x27;card&#x27;], mode=&#x27;subscription&#x27;, line_items=[{ &#x27;price&#x27;: price, &#x27;quantity&#x27;: quantity }], )</code></pre>

Edwin from Stripe here. Just to be totally clear, only a very small fraction of Stripe’s userbase is impacted by this. That said, Stripe being unavailable for even a single user is very concerning for us, and we’re fixing things as rapidly as we can. Follow this thread for updates: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stripestatus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1561809071061155841" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stripestatus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1561809071061155841</a>.

We haven&#x27;t been able to process any new payments for the past 4 hours due to this issue which seems to be causing many others issues - see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stripestatus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1561780140270501888" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stripestatus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1561780140270501888</a>

willing to bet that 99.999% uptime is just static text, because 5+ hours out of 2190 hours is not 99.999%

Same issue, customers notify us before hearing anything from Stripe. 4 hours of no payment processing really hurts

How does Stripe compare with Avalara for tax handling?

Don&#x27;t get a job at a SaaS company if you want WLB, kiddos

whats the point of Stipe Tax anyway? they solve only the trivial part (calculating how much VAT is due for a transaction), while ignoring the hard part (actually paying the VAT to hundreds of tax offices in countries all around the world). despite only solving the trivial part that any developer can do in a day, they take another huge chunk of your revenue. seems like a bad deal.

Every Stripe issue invites a flood of complaints, which is fine, but... try Better Business Bureau. They have a tracking process, they keep score, they assign a grade.<p>By the way, Stripe responses to BBB complaints are hilarious [1]. Most of the ones I read close with an identical snippet of text dismissing the claim as &quot;baseless&quot;, even when they admit they made a mistake. It&#x27;s astonishingly inept and says a lot about the attitude toward the customer.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbb.org&#x2F;us&#x2F;ca&#x2F;san-francisco&#x2F;profile&#x2F;payment-processing-services&#x2F;stripe-inc-1116-437157&#x2F;complaints" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbb.org&#x2F;us&#x2F;ca&#x2F;san-francisco&#x2F;profile&#x2F;payment-proc...</a>

This issue has been preventing new subscriptions for our company since around 1pm PT. We’re seeing an error loading our origin address within Stripe Tax settings as well, which might be helpful for identifying the source of the problem.

Glad I didn&#x27;t launch the finclout promotion on AppSumo last weekend.

Ever since patio11 pushed that dubious Stripe Atlas program that resulted in far more headache than worth (turns out Delaware is the crappiest state to incorporate) my trust in Stripe going downhill.<p>I think what really did it was that it took somebody a while back to post on HN about issues with Stripe regarding tax that jepordized his business to get the situation fixed.<p>I don&#x27;t know but lately it seems like so much of YC&#x27;s production is just pure garbage. From coinbase to ponzi metaverses to now Stripe screwing up like this.<p>If anybody has alternative to Stripe please reply here, been with Stripe for almost 7 years and looking to bounce.

Still down it seems, Deliveroo payments are failing in Belgium.

We recently contacted their sales team with intention to re-work pricing. We did not mention that in first mail and got immediate response. When we mentioned we want to negotiate pricing, noone has responded in months now.

Love Stripe.<p>But their record on de-platforming people for dubious reasons is not great.