Is the payment gateway down, or is it my store?

The short answer

Open the provider’s status page, then try one purchase yourself with a different payment method. If the status page is green and every method fails, the problem is in your store. If only one method fails and its status page is green, look at that integration: credentials, webhooks or a script being blocked. If the status page reports an incident, it is the provider.

In our checkout failure data from 89 stores, the payment step was where 5% of incidents stopped. The checkout step before it (forms, sessions, scripts) was 33%. When customers say “payment doesn’t work”, the page that broke is often the one just before payment.

Check the provider first: it takes one minute

Every large provider publishes a status page. Look for an incident that covers your region and the product you use (card payments, the hosted checkout, webhooks):

Then open your own account dashboard at the provider. A wave of failed or declined attempts in the last hour, across many customers and cards, points to the provider or to your account (a suspended account, a changed key). No attempts at all while customers say they are trying means the request never left your store.

Signs the problem is your store

These point to the store side, even when the provider is fine:

For WooCommerce, read the gateway’s log under WooCommerce → Status → Logs. For Magento 2, look in var/log/exception.log and var/log/system.log, and in var/log/payment.log if the method has debug logging on. An authentication or “invalid API key” error there means credentials, not an outage.

The most common store-side causes have their own guides: payment methods that disappear, a failing WooCommerce payment gateway and a security plugin that blocks checkout.

Signs the provider is the problem

The status page lists an incident, the provider’s dashboard shows errors on its side (timeouts, 5xx responses), and other stores using the same provider report the same thing at the same time. Your checkout loads normally, the payment form appears, and the failure happens after the customer submits the card.

There is little to fix on your side. If you have a second method set up, make it visible at the top of the list, tell customers on the checkout page, and watch the provider’s status page for the all-clear. When it is over, check for orders stuck in pending payment: the pending payment guide shows how to resend the confirmations the store missed.

Find out in ten minutes

1. Status page. Is there an incident for your provider, region and product right now?
2. Provider dashboard. Failed attempts, or no attempts at all, in the minutes customers complained about?
3. One purchase yourself. Private window, a real product, to the payment step. Does the form load?
4. A second method. Does bank transfer or another gateway get through to an order?
5. Console and logs. Blocked scripts or CSP errors in the browser; authentication errors in the gateway log.
6. What changed. Deploys, updates, security or CDN rules in the last 24 hours.

If steps 1 and 2 are clean and step 3 fails, it is the store. You can also run the free checkout audit: a real browser walks your Magento or WooCommerce checkout once and shows the step where it stops.

Hear about it before your customers do

Customers rarely write. Most just leave, so a broken payment step can run for hours before anyone notices the missing orders. MageSentinel goes through your checkout on a schedule, up to the payment step, and alerts you with the step that failed and a code such as PAYMENT_NO_METHODS, PAYMENT_METHOD_UNAVAILABLE or PAYMENT_UI_ERROR, plus a screenshot, the console and the network log.

With that evidence you usually know which side failed before opening the provider’s dashboard. See everything MageSentinel checks, or start with the free audit.