When Stripe Goes Down: How to Keep Selling Without Interruptions

For many eCommerce merchants, Stripe is the backbone of their checkout experience. It’s fast, flexible, and developer-friendly, which is why it powers payments for millions of businesses worldwide. But like any cloud-based service, Stripe isn’t immune to outages. When downtime strikes, the cost to your brand can be severe: lost sales, frustrated customers, and broken trust.

So what can merchants do to prepare? And how can you ensure that your checkout stays live - even when your primary processor doesn’t? Let’s explore what happens when Stripe goes down, the real-world risks involved, and how Lasso’s infrastructure can help you maintain business continuity without missing a beat.

Stripe Outages Are Rare, But Costly

Stripe’s track record for uptime is among the best in the payments industry. However, even brief outages can create significant disruption. When Stripe experiences downtime, whether due to API failures, regional issues, or partner infrastructure problems, merchants relying solely on Stripe may see failed checkouts, stalled orders, or payment errors at scale.

For high-volume stores, even a few minutes of downtime during peak hours can result in thousands of dollars in missed revenue. And for smaller brands, the customer support burden and lost trust can be even more damaging.

Outages don’t always mean the entire Stripe platform is offline. Sometimes the disruption affects only specific endpoints; like webhooks, card tokenization, or payment authorization. But any interruption in the payment flow can be enough to break the checkout experience, which is often the most critical moment in the buyer journey.

The Hidden Risk: Single Point of Failure

Relying on one payment processor, whether it’s Stripe, PayPal, or any other gateway, creates a single point of failure in your revenue pipeline. If that provider goes offline, so does your ability to generate revenue.

Unfortunately, most merchants don’t realize this risk until it’s too late. Many checkout systems are tightly coupled to their payment processor’s APIs, with no fallback or failover strategy in place. As a result, the entire shopping flow can grind to a halt during an outage.

This vulnerability isn’t just about downtime. It also affects operational flexibility. Without the ability to route payments or switch processors dynamically, you may be locked into higher fees, limited features, or regional constraints.

How to Stay Operational When Stripe Goes Down

Business continuity in payments starts with redundancy and adaptability. Here are the core strategies merchants should have in place:

First, decouple your checkout from a single provider. Instead of embedding payment logic that depends exclusively on Stripe’s APIs, build or use a checkout layer that can abstract payment processing across multiple gateways. This makes it possible to reroute traffic if one processor becomes unavailable.

Second, enable automatic failover to a secondary payment provider. This means if Stripe goes down, transactions can instantly be routed through another gateway; such as Adyen, Braintree, or a regional backup processor, without user disruption.

Third, monitor system health in real time. Knowing exactly when and where an issue is occurring allows you to respond quickly and confidently. Your platform should include system alerts and diagnostics tied directly to transaction success rates, so you can switch routing if needed.

Lasso Keeps You Selling, Even When Stripe Doesn't

This is where Lasso Checkout offers a powerful edge. Built with resiliency in mind, Lasso gives merchants the ability to integrate multiple processors behind the scenes, and dynamically route payments based on availability, geography, or business logic.

If Stripe goes down, Lasso doesn’t. Our platform continues operating by rerouting transactions through your alternate provider, ensuring that customers can still complete their purchases. The transition is seamless… no broken buttons, no dead checkouts, no lost sales.

Lasso also provides:

• API-level abstraction, allowing you to plug in new processors without rewriting your frontend.
  
  
  

• Automatic failover logic, so you don’t have to manually intervene during downtime.
  
  
  

• Real-time health monitoring, alerting you to payment anomalies before they impact customers.
  
  
  

• First-party tracking and checkout customization, ensuring a cohesive experience across all providers.
  
  
  

In short, Lasso helps you build a checkout system that works for you, not one that fails because of a dependency outside your control.

Business Continuity Is a Competitive Advantage

In the world of digital commerce, reliability is revenue. Customers don’t care why your checkout isn’t working, they’ll simply abandon their cart and move on. But merchants who plan ahead, who diversify their payment infrastructure, and who invest in resilience will always be one step ahead of competitors.

Lasso helps merchants turn this reliability into a real-time advantage. Whether you’re scaling globally, protecting your margins, or navigating platform risk, our flexible checkout and payment tools ensure that your store doesn’t stop just because one provider does.

Final Thoughts

Stripe is an excellent payment processor, but no system is perfect. When Stripe goes down, your ability to continue selling depends entirely on how well you’ve prepared your infrastructure.

With Lasso, eCommerce brands gain more than just a checkout tool. They gain a layer of control, flexibility, and resilience that keeps revenue flowing, no matter what’s happening behind the scenes.

If your business depends on uninterrupted sales, it’s time to rethink your dependency on a single payment provider. Let Lasso help you build a checkout that’s as durable as your brand.