Patreon confirms outages affecting creator payouts

One of the biggest platforms for content creators is dealing with outages affecting payouts for users of the site.

Patreon – a site used by millions of writers, podcasters and others who create subscription-based content – began facing issues on Tuesday, according to a spokesperson for the company.

Patreon head of communications Ellen Satterwhite told Recorded Future News that they have received multiple reports over the last 48 hours about an issue “affecting payouts for creators using a single payment partner” – which the company said on Twitter was financial services company Payoneer. Stripe and Hyperwallet “are not affected,” according to Satterwhite.

“We have temporarily paused payouts from this partner while we resolve the issue. At the same time, an unrelated issue is causing a slightly higher-than-normal number of patron payments to be flagged as fraudulent by their banks,” Satterwhite said.

“We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause creators and their patrons. We are working diligently to resolve these issues and will continue to update our blog.”

On Twitter, the company said on Thursday afternoon that it has “fixed the root cause and are working actively with Payoneer to restore payouts.”

“We expect to restore them today, and we appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this,” the company said.

Several creators and customers took to Twitter and other social media sites to complain about the outages. Author Jason Pargin said he was sent an email saying his credit card blocked Patreon creator payments as fraudulent, and subsequently canceled all of the subscriptions he had on the site.

“I told the credit card company the charge was valid, fine. Patreon sent an email saying "click here to update your payment" and that link goes to a 404 error. My list of supported creators is gone, I have to try to remember who I was supporting - there is nothing on the site,” he said.

Hey, if you're a Patreon creator and are confused as to why a bunch of your income vanished, it's because Patreon's system appears to have totally collapsed. They sent me an email saying my credit card blocked the payment as fraudulent, and CANCELLED ALL OF MY CREATOR SUPPORT. 1/

— Jason Pargin, author of John Dies at the End, etc (@JasonKPargin) August 2, 2023

Dozens of people on Twitter and Reddit reported losing thousands of dollars in payments and saw steep declines in the number of subscribers.

Patreon officials did not respond to requests for comment about whether the issues were related to the company’s decision to move their billing location from California to Ireland.

The company has more than 6 million patrons on the site.