Guides / Stripe card reader offline: outage or the till Wi-Fi?
Updated 3 Oct 2026
Stripe card reader offline: outage or the till Wi-Fi?
Terminal offline is almost never the global Stripe API. Work the reader, the LAN, then the public Atom feed.
A shop writes "we cannot take cards" at 12:10 on a Saturday. That is a real emergency. It is still usually not a Stripe outage.
What the public board can tell you
Stripe publishes an Atom feed. We poll that on the Stripe status page. Individual readers do not appear there — Stripe says reader fleet health lives in your own Dashboard. If the Atom feed is quiet and Dashboard.stripe.com shows other payments landing, the platform is up.
The till
- Power cycle the reader, then the Wi-Fi AP the reader actually joined — not the one with the stronger SSID in the back office.
- Does the Stripe app on a phone, on LTE, take a tap? Yes: the merchant account is fine. The counter network is not.
- Readers that skipped a firmware update will sit on "offline" after a TLS change. Update one, not the whole drawer at once.
- Ethernet readers that someone unplugged to vacuum the floor: more common than a global API outage.
If Stripe really is posting
Read the product name. Checkout, Connect, Issuing, Terminal, and Radar fail separately. A Radar false-positive wave is not "Stripe is down" and it is not fixed by rebooting a BBPOS.
Have a fallback before Saturday: phone tap, Dashboard virtual terminal, or a second acquirer. Writing the plan during the lunch rush is how you donate the takings to cash.