Faultline

What breaks when your payment processor goes down?

When your payment processor (Stripe) goes offline, no new charges can be processed, refunds are stuck, and downstream compliance reporting breaks. In a simulated 3-hour Stripe outage across 18 interconnected services, 3 services failed completely and 1 degraded, with an estimated revenue impact of $350,000+. The cascade flows from Stripe through Payment Processing into the Transaction Ledger and Compliance Engine.

Stripe has experienced partial or full outages several times per year. Use the interactive simulator below to trigger the outage and watch the cascade unfold in real time.

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Expected Impact Summary

When this scenario is triggered, the cascade engine traces every dependency path and calculates the full blast radius. Here's what happens to the 18-service infrastructure over 3 hours:

Cascade order: Stripe → Payment Processing → Transaction Ledger → Compliance Engine

This simulation is powered by Faultline's dependency mapping and cascade analysis engine — the same engine you can use on your own infrastructure. Get early access to map your services, run your own simulations, and identify single points of failure before they cause real outages.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does Stripe go down?

Stripe has experienced partial or full outages several times per year, typically lasting 1-4 hours. Even brief interruptions can mean significant revenue loss for high-volume platforms.

Should I have a backup payment processor?

For critical payment flows, yes. Having a secondary processor like Adyen or Braintree as a failover can keep revenue flowing during outages. Faultline helps you identify whether your payment path is a single point of failure.

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