Issue affecting the Gateway API on the Braintree platform (opens in new tab)

Some context[1] for the non-Bostonians

   Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
   RED LINE
   Ashmont/Braintree
   4 current alerts

So it seems this line is pretty unreliable.

[1] https://www.mbta.com/schedules/Red/line

I haven't had enough coffee yet, I saw the headline and couldn't figure out why something didn't make sense reading it and I live in Boston.

Glad to see this comment to explain it.

Haven't lived in Boston since early 2018 and I've only heard worse and worse things. Good grief.

For context, the original HN title was:

BrainTree has been down for more than 7 hours now

Hahaha this is what my brain went to immediately as well

Not sure, but anecdotally I haven't received any such notices even though I do have active connections.

The trend is is to downplay the issue in status messages to obscure the real problem. That message could mean anything from an extra 1% of rejections to 99% of transactions are failing.

The vagueness is the point, because they want to avoid admitting serious problems.

We had this problem with some devops hires who came from a big company. They’d delay updating the status page as long as possible, then update with the weakest language that was technically correct. “Some customers might experience degraded performance” was their go-to message for nearly complete outages. They’d argue that it was technically correct because some requests were getting through in some logs somewhere.

It was a side effect of working in an environment where their bonuses depended on downtime and the severity of outages. The game was to admit as little as possible to keep those bonus numbers high. We didn’t calculate bonuses that way but they had ingrained the behavior from years of BigCo performance reviews.

For us the rejection rate is 90+% which is equivalent to down for me.

For merchants it is, I worked on a marketplace before and having checkout flows with higher than usual declines will eat on your sales. People don't tolerate it so well and will either drop the purchase completely if it's a "want" and not a "need", or will go to the competition to finish the purchase.

If a site is being DDoSed and only 10% of legitimate traffic is going through, is it "up"? I think you'd be hard pressed to call that "not down". So if the proximate cause is fraud instead of network requests, how is it any different?

I absolutely despise this kind of language that is becoming so commonplace now and is obvious BS. I wish I could pay my bills to these same companies using language like this. "It's not that I didn't pay my bill, it's just that some dollars may experience longer-than-usual time to get to your bank."

If you're trying to order lunch or pay for your medicine online, then yeah I'd say it's pretty much down.

Unless it's hosted on Solana...

or

on the Ethereum blockchain, where, yes, the service is not technically down but unavailable to anyone who isn't paying a hundred bucks for a simple transaction.

It's technically not a lie.

It's a half-truth which is technically the same or worse than a lie.

Or that one microservice holding up the other 10,000 microservices keeled over :)

Last time Stripe had extended downtime, it was DNS. I think that's more likely than a missing database.

I don't think that's the most common cause. Deleting the production database is obviously disastrous but there are many other reasons for extended downtime, and they're usually about the distributed-ness of the underlying architecture.

I could name plenty of other systems nobody wants and speak to their uptime, too? My Plex server probably has better uptime than GitHub lately but I’m not gonna start pushing my code there. It does its job serving the barbie movie, just like defi tells me who to unfollow.

"My toilet pipes are broken and I have to get a plumber."

"Shitting in the woods is never broken."

It’s also never been up

Well yeah, in DeFi you also wouldn't have an anti-fraud gateway because then there'd be no transactions.

Defi doesn't have disputes nor chargebacks either, complete no-go for any mainstream checkout flow.

And yet no-one apart from a tiny handful of techbros uses it.

Almost as if uptime isn't the only thing that matters.

But it is illegal depending on the country, Or a scam depending on the receiver, Or centralized if you use a hosted wallet, DeFIs merits on paper sound life changing, but reality is far from it. It's an unorganized, volatile mess.

The value is down on 99% of the coins, though

Defi has no fraud protection

people in the comments are getting nasty. Sure the ecosystem is plagued with scammers, but financial system in general is filled with scammers. We just have insurance products or the faith of the US government to bail you out lol

I still believe in digital currency as the future.