8 ms·
Stripe down for 4 hours (and counting) for all those with Stripe Tax enabled
- yeahdef 4y agowilling to bet that 99.999% uptime is just static text, because 5+ hours out of 2190 hours is not 99.999%
- GingerMidas 4y agoFrom @koopajah on discord: "We don't really drop nines if one specific feature is having issues". Pretty convenient payment processing is just a "feature" of a payment infrastructure SaaS
- redditor98654 4y agoHate it when companies do it. It should be the min of the availabilities of your APIs.
- civilized 4y agoI guess 99.999% uptime is no longer an engineer's well-earned badge of honor at Stripe. Now it's just sales puffery, like a LOWEST PRICES IN THE CITY!! sign at a discount store. Sorry, but true class isn't just elegant rectangles decorated by various subtle shades of gray sans serif.
- throwawaypppu 4y agoThis is a bullshit and untenable position. This “one specific feature” takes out the core feature. Shameful, deceitful and reputation tarnishing position.
- jhugo 4y agoTo be fair, it only takes out the core feature for people using Stripe Tax, which is apparently a small fraction of customers.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoa.k.a. "my probed availability ignores user journeys that are actually an important part of my product"
- quickthrower2 4y agoIn a OKR culture, the way to make your KR good is to add lots of useless and very simple microservices, which are always up, so the overall metric is 100%.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoIf your KRs are the uptimes of your simple microservices, you're not in an OKR culture.
- edwinwee 4y agoIt is not static text. Calcuated automatically.
- mdavidn 4y agoIt's disingenuous to report "partial degradation" as "uptime" when some customers are unable to process any payments.
- fastball 4y agoYes, you either need to have a per-customer uptime number (that is visible to those customers) or you have one unified uptime number that takes a hit if any customers experience downtime. You can't have it both ways.
- jefftk 4y agoWhy can't you maintain and report an average uptime across all service usage? So if you have an outage that affects 1% of traffic it moves your figure 1/10th as one on 10% of traffic? That's what I'd expect a reported number to be, since that's what a client experiences on average.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoStripe has only existed for 2190 hours? /s
- eskimo-bananas 4y agothe service doesn’t look to be down for everyone. if their status is a percentage of requests, then a relatively small number of 500s compared to a big total volume will be tiny, even if ongoing.
- mupuff1234 4y agoDidn't they just fire a bunch of people working on a tax product? https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/stripe-layoffs-taxjar-tech/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/stripe-layoffs-taxjar-tech...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- augustohp 4y agoTLDR: Stripe bought TaxJar last year, to help customers “automatically calculate, report and file sales taxes”. ~25% of TaxJars employees let go this July, when Stripe's valuation dropped 28%.
- jsemrau 4y agoGlad I didn't launch the finclout promotion on AppSumo last weekend.
- whyleym 4y agoWe haven'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 https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1561780140270501888 https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1561780140270501888
- yani 4y agoThe issue started 5h47m ago for us. The Stripe status page is unreliable like everyone's else status page. The Stripe API returns "An unknown error occurred". 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.
- edwinwee 4y ago(Think you mixed up some tweets here—you may have seen a recovery tweet about an unrelated issue. This is the canonical thread to follow: https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1561809071061155841 https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1561809071061155841.)
- GingerMidas 4y agoSame issue, customers notify us before hearing anything from Stripe. 4 hours of no payment processing really hurts
- redwood 4y agoHow does Stripe compare with Avalara for tax handling?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- edwinwee 4y agoEdwin 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: https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1561809071061155841 https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1561809071061155841.
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoDo you have any medium for such updates available to those who aren’t on Twitter?
- edwinwee 4y ago$ stripe status with Stripe CLI (https://stripe.com/docs/cli/status https://stripe.com/docs/cli/status) or RSS: https://status.stripe.com/current/atom.xml https://status.stripe.com/current/atom.xml
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoThank you
- AussieWog93 4y ago>Stripe being unavailable for even a single user is very concerning for us And yet when my website's card payments were abruptly disabled because some opaque ML algorithm decided one of my transactions was fraudulent (in spite of the customer's own insistence that it was genuine), you wouldn't even respond to my emails. If you want a no-bullshit payment processor that actually gives a fuck about their customers, try pinpayments.com.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- edwinwee 4y agoHm, we respond to emails, so I wonder what broke here. If you're still interested in narrowing down what happened to that transaction, could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?
- vaidhy 4y agoDid they not fire a large portion of the teams behind the tax team (acquired company)?
- kyleee 4y agoAhh yes actually, the story was posted here too. It would be especially interesting if this is a case of employee retaliation
- jeromegv 4y agoIt doesn’t need to be employee retaliation but it can totally be a part of the system that goes down and the person that knew that system well is gone.
- kyleee 4y agoplausible; good idea to pay out a healthy retainer along with severance package to a few of people with the most experience/capabilities in the system. much cheaper than an outage
- icelancer 4y agoStripe 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. We've been with them for 10 years and their customer service is atrocious on this position, which is unfortunate since historically it's been quite good. 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.
- GingerMidas 4y agoAre processors like Square any better?
- icelancer 4y agoPossibly. I'm still angry at Square because I emailed them repeatedly 10+ years ago telling them to add gateway processing (which they didn't have), and they took forever. Stripe's business shouldn't even exist. Square had a head start and should have just made a payment gateway/API and eaten their lunch. They absolutely had an internal API, quite obviously, so not productizing it and letting a whole new business in Stripe come around and launch that product and crush them was absurd. I've used Square's on-premises processing for minor stuff like a side business of mine, but nothing too serious. Their fees aren't too good; they're comparable to Stripe but Stripe's ecosystem for developers is far better. If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support.
- GingerMidas 4y agoThat's pretty funny in hindsight. > If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support. Also what we're considering right about now
- 4y ago
- candiddevmike 4y agoSwitched to Paddle earlier this year for other reasons, glad I'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.
- remorses 4y agoPaddle is a bit of a joke tbh, you can’t even create a coupon for a subscription with a trial They also randomly removed domain approval for some days without even sending any notification They will also take you VAT if user inputs his VAT number but you have “VAT included in price” option enabled
- benbristow 4y agoIf it goes down though, you're up s's creek without Paddle ;)
- GingerMidas 4y agoLooks expensive, though. 5% + 50¢
- adamnemecek 4y agoThey also do more AFAIK.
- kc10 4y agoThey offer merchant of record services, which essentially means you can sell worldwide without worrying about tax issues. I have contemplated Stripe vs Paddle couple of months ago. But ultimately chose to stay with Stripe and deal with tax complexities when there is sizable revenue.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoIt costs real money to provide real support. For those CTOs in the back: YOU NEED TO PAY REAL MONEY TO GET REAL SERVICE.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoDon't get a job at a SaaS company if you want WLB, kiddos
- civilized 4y agoEvery 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. 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 "baseless", even when they admit they made a mistake. It's astonishingly inept and says a lot about the attitude toward the customer. [1] https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/payment-processing-services/stripe-inc-1116-437157/complaints https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/payment-proc...
- upupandup 4y agolast time I did this, the business in question threatened with legal action and I realized BBB was NOT on the consumers side.
- cyral 4y agoBBB gets money from businesses who pay for their accreditation, similar to how Yelp magically helps remove bad reviews when you pay for their services. It's a total conflict of interest. They are technically a non-profit, but that doesn't mean there execs aren't getting paid handsomely.
- tangled 4y ago(I worked for Yelp for over eight years, knew large parts of the codebase, and never once saw any evidence that it was possible to pay to remove bad reviews.)
- civilized 4y agoDid you search the codebase for calls to pay_to_remove_bad_reviews?
- annexrichmond 4y agoI also worked for Yelp as an eng, and I used to say the same thing until I personally had my negative review removed from a business page for a paying advertiser by the User Ops team
- upupandup 4y agoEver 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. 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. I don't know but lately it seems like so much of YC's production is just pure garbage. From coinbase to ponzi metaverses to now Stripe screwing up like this. If anybody has alternative to Stripe please reply here, been with Stripe for almost 7 years and looking to bounce.
- Axsuul 4y agoWhat made it a headache to incorporate in Delaware?
- irfwashere 4y agoDon't know if it works for your use case but I've been pretty happy with cardknox
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dangrossman 4y ago> If anybody has alternative to Stripe please reply here, been with Stripe for almost 7 years and looking to bounce. I still use what everyone used before Stripe: a "merchant account" from an ISO/MSP of a bank. Google "interchange plus merchant account" to find a hundred options. You pay some fixed markup over interchange rates set by the card networks, as low as 0.05% + $0.21 to charge a debit or check card for example. Quite a bit of savings over Stripe for most card mixes... I used to recommend Spreedly to go with that, a payment gateway agnostic credit card vault so you can take your customers with you if you switch merchant accounts or payment gateways in the future, but they turned toxic over the years. Seemingly only care about enterprise customers, their sales/support team I've interacted with are useless, and they raised my subscription rate by over 30x without an ounce of empathy. I'm still trying to find time to replace them.
- eric4smith 4y agoLove Stripe. But their record on de-platforming people for dubious reasons is not great.
- qamorgan 4y agoThis 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.
- navarro485 4y agoA temporary stop-gap solution for this (if you are using Stripe Checkout) is to disable tax calculation. https://stripe.com/docs/api/checkout/sessions/create#create_checkout_session-automatic_tax https://stripe.com/docs/api/checkout/sessions/create#create_... session = stripe.checkout.Session.create( automatic_tax={'enabled': False}, payment_method_types=['card'], mode='subscription', line_items=[{ 'price': price, 'quantity': quantity }], )
- Lightbody 4y agoAnnoyingly, I thought about doing this a few minutes into the outage and then said: "Nah... they'll fix it pretty quickly". Five hours later I finally made the change. UGH.
- adityapatadia 4y agoWe 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.
- lifeinthevoid 4y agoStill down it seems, Deliveroo payments are failing in Belgium.
- Xunjin 4y agoDid they gave some kind of statement what might be the problem?
- dinkblam 4y agowhats 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.
- lambda_lord 4y agoCalculation is trivial if you are only operating in a single tax jurisdiction, maybe. Tax calculation software handles all the different tax rates for product categories your business sells, changes in city/district/federal tax rates, brackets and min/max caps, sales tax holidays, etc. It costs money to maintain those databases. Saying it can be done by any developer in a day is absurd.