Stripe's API was down again • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#61

Post by dangrossman » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

athrun wrote: post #60

dangrossman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what happens when the vault goes down?

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.

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#62

Post by egty » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:53 AM UTC

harrygallagher4 wrote: post #36

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! :)

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

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#63

Post by procinct » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 4:44 AM UTC

dmlittle wrote: post #46

procinct wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, looks like I was mistaken

I looked and triple checked before posting this to make sure I didn't accidentally miss it ;)

You're clearly more careful than I am :)

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#64

Post by eropple » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 5:09 AM UTC

leesalminen wrote: post #24

dmlittle wrote: post #23

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 cas…

I’ve used StatusGator for this in the past with success.

StatusGator isn't granular enough. Having a service go yellow just because a totally different geographic region got sad is annoying.

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#65

Post by personomas » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 12:37 PM UTC

tibbon wrote: post #44

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…

So far I've had great experiences with Stripe's support.

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#66

Post by duxup » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #57

duxup wrote: post #54

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.

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,…

Thank you.

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#67

Post by joemag » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

tibbon wrote: post #44

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…

Agree. I once had to explain the concept of idempotemcy to a payment processor, whose APIs lacked it.

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#68

Post by robbyt » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

tibbon wrote: post #44

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…

If this is true, why not name them to help others?

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#69

Post by drspacemonkey » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

october_sky wrote: post #52

drspacemonkey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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