Stripe was down • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe was down

#21

Post by michaelschade » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 4:21 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #17

michaelschade wrote: post #9

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. 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).

[deleted]

Yes, I totally hear you -- this is why we treat any API unavailability as such a huge deal and feel so bad about it. Whether customers can or should retry is a question we sometimes get from users after API errors and so I wanted to be proactive about answering it. (And our users often have Stripe.js tokens or customer tokens that they can retry.) But, you're totally right; this definitely doesn't solve all cases.

In the unlikely event there's anything I can do to help, definitely drop me an email.

Re: Stripe was down

#22

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 4:34 AM UTC

michaelschade wrote: post #21

[deleted] wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Yes, I totally hear you -- this is why we treat any API unavailability as such a huge deal and feel so bad about it. Whether customers can or should retry is a question we sometimes get from users after API errors and so I wanted to be proactive about answering it. (And our users often have Stripe.js tokens or customer tokens that they can retry.) But, you're totally right; this definitely doesn't solve all cases. In…

[deleted]

Re: Stripe was down

#23

Post by nolim1t » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 4:46 AM UTC

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).

I never rely on a single point of failure. And of course, always good to have a "plan B" in place.

Re: Stripe was down

#24

Post by reustle » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 4:52 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #20

LeoPanthera wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else do you expect him to say?

[deleted]

Oh give me a break. Be upset that it went down and you maybe lost a few sales, not that this guy is trying to be helpful and confirms that it is back up and OK to retry transactions. There are plenty of people using stripe for non-ecommerce things.

Re: Stripe was down

#25

Post by keehun » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 5:10 AM UTC

What I'm about to say is definitely NOT IN ANY SENSE Schadenfreude, but...

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.

Re: Stripe was down

#26

Post by daveguy » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 5:15 AM UTC

michaelschade wrote: post #21

[deleted] wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Yes, I totally hear you -- this is why we treat any API unavailability as such a huge deal and feel so bad about it. Whether customers can or should retry is a question we sometimes get from users after API errors and so I wanted to be proactive about answering it. (And our users often have Stripe.js tokens or customer tokens that they can retry.) But, you're totally right; this definitely doesn't solve all cases. In…

There was some question as to what "partial degradation" means on the status site. Is that a " takes longer than x milliseconds to respond" type measurement? Can you clarify?

Re: Stripe was down

#27

Post by breakingcups » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 10:30 AM UTC

keehun wrote: post #25

What I'm about to say is definitely NOT IN ANY SENSE Schadenfreude, but... 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.

Oh great, I thought I was the only one!

Re: Stripe was down

#28

Post by potatosareok2 » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 10:31 AM UTC

keehun wrote: post #25

What I'm about to say is definitely NOT IN ANY SENSE Schadenfreude, but... 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.

Don't be so excited! Maybe they just dropped another DB index and the guy who did it still has no visibility into the actual DB load.

https://support.stripe.com/questions/outage-postmortem-2015-...