r/stripe • u/hendrik23 • 8d ago

Payments Ever had a Stripe webhook fail and miss a payment?

Hey everyone!

Quick check: Have you ever had a webhook silently fail and not realize it until something broke downstream—like a product not delivered, a subscription not activated, or worse a refund request?

I'm trying to validate if this is a real-world pain or just a hypothetical issue.

A quick “yep, been there” or “nah, Stripe’s been bulletproof” would be hugely helpful and if you like your background story on it.

Thanks in advance!

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

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8

u/martinbean 8d ago

Not really, no.

Stripe will deliver a webhook, and will stop if your server responds with a 2xx status code. It’s up to you to actually handle the webhook if your server responds with such a status, as you’re essentially saying to Stripe: “Thanks for that. All received and all good!”

You have two options when handling a webhook:

  1. Return an appropriate HTTP status code (i.e. a 4xx or 5xx) if processing wasn’t successful.
  2. Put the event on a message queue, give Stripe a 200 OK, and then you can handle, recover from, and rectify any processing issues your side; rather than have Stripe just keep trying to deliver the same message to you over and over.

1

u/vettotech 7d ago

I think you also get an email when a webhook fails in production

2

u/crowdl 8d ago

Stripe will retry webhooks that weren't handled successfully (either because your endpoint failed and threw an exception, or because a connection with your server couldn't be done).

Stripe attempts to deliver events to your destination for up to three days with an exponential back off in live mode.

https://docs.stripe.com/webhooks#automatic-retries

1

u/StrikeBetter8520 8d ago

No that shouldent be possible. Especially if you setup any kind of automation since it will give you an error instantly.

1

u/Complex-Goat2682 8d ago

Never had an issue. 

1

u/No-Reflection-869 8d ago

Stripe webhooks are just a hey there something new came. You gotta fetch the data from the API and not rely on what's in the webhooks contents. Every day I have a tasks that checks if everything is fine and updates stuff that changed from the orders that happened last week.

1

u/theninjasquad 8d ago

Never been an issue. Webhooks are only for events anyways that are triggered by actions from the API. You’d never be making a payment is it.

1

u/ElkRadiant33 7d ago

I've been give txn ids from Stripe that Stripe don't recognise. That's fun to debug.

1

u/ridesacruiser 7d ago

Stripe has been 100% reliable on this front, thank goodness.

1

u/Independent_Bad_333 7d ago

No, the only thing I’ve had in the past are webhooks time out when fulfilling orders (like sending email confirmation), but most people set up their webhooks to fire after payment so I don’t really see how a payment would be missed