Webhooks Failing in Stripe Suddenly

Anyone else noticing webhooks failing in Stripe toady (April 2). I’m seeing sporadic failures stating that Stripe is unable to connect. Not all are failing and usually go through when attempted again. Stripe says it is due to a network connectivity issue on my end. My hosting provider with a dedicated server says there is no issue on their end, but has made it a point to blame my security software (not the problem), and also s2Member which I also don’t think is the problem. This just started today - never had this issue before. Anyone else seeing something similar? I want to rule out any issues with Stripe and s2Member.

No issues from my clients.

I took a look at the downdetector but no general problems reported.

Is there a time-of-day pattern to your problem?

The reason I ask is that the global work-from-home push is stretching the Internet. TCP, by design, discards packets when the network is congested. TCP will retry but dropped connections would not be unheard of on a heavily congested network. HTTP does not retry as it expects the application to decide if it wants to retry or not. In this case the application is WordPress / S2member…so you see a Stripe transaction retry. The fact that the retry succeeds and given that you have not experienced issues before…I would assume network congestion is the issue.

Now if network congestion is the issue but others are not reporting it then it could be an issue with the network provider who your hosting provider subscribes to. So it is not a failure within the hosting provider’s infrastructure but rather a deficiency in the capacity management of the network carrier that your hosting provider subscribes to.

Is your hosting provider a small niche provider or an AWS / Azure?

Thanks Tim,

After going crazy all day, I’ve come to a similar conclusion. The failures began at precisely at 7:30 AM this morning and have continued all day. My hosting is with Hostgator - so not the smallest provider but also not the largest - and also not the fastest. It wouldn’t surprise me if it came down to their carrier - or perhaps they changed something this morning to handle all of the increased traffic. It has been very odd - no pattern to the failures at all. When retried - most of them succeed - however it sometimes takes a couple of tries. After reaching out to them, they really tried to pass the blame and insisted it wasn’t my dedicated server - which only hosts my site.

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Some issues with HostGator but nothing that likely matches your issue:

If you do a traceroute from your server it will show you which carrier your traffic is being carried on. You can then look at DownDetector for that network carrier to see if they have reported issues. I have experienced the occasional AWS outage that was not AWS fault…it wa their network carrier that was having the troubles. AWS just copped the customer flack that should have been directed at their carrier.

Which country is your server in? If your server is outside the U.S. you may be hit with insufficient overseas capacity provision by hostgator’s network service provider since the Stripe server would, I expect, be in the U.S.

Check the Stripe domain / ip address to are connecting to and your IP address and verify you are in the same country. Also, where is your DNS server. If you are using a non-hostgator DNS server you can also experience connection issues it the DNS lookup process is failing.

If you really want to trace it you would need to log the network traffic on your server.