Patreon payment outage leaves influencers in the lurch

Patreon, a members-only online subscription service used by thousands of content creators worldwide, said it’s currently working to fix a two-day outage that forced the company to temporarily suspend all user payments.

“We have fixed the root cause and are working actively with Payoneer to restore payouts within the day, and appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this,” the company said in a statement posted on its website Thursday.

“Stripe and Hyperwallet payouts are not affected. We'll share updates at status.patreon.com as we continue to work on this,” the post said.

The company also posted the update on its @PatreonSupport X profile page, stating it was actively testing the fix before it would begin to “ramp up Payoneer payouts availability to the broader creator base.”

Patreon creators and artists earn a monthly income by providing exclusive content and other perks to fans who pay the influencers a monthly subscription fee directly through the platform.

The suspension left thousands of social media influencers and creators without a way to collect payouts from fans, often their only source of income.

Payoneer is an American third-party financial services company used by Patreon to process its subscription payments.

The membership platform reported it was “investigating an issue with payouts,” on its X support page, around 11 am ET Wednesday.

It appears issues with processing payments were first noted on X August 1st, after Patreon members complained their payments were being declined and creators were unable to collect payouts.

Hours later, Patreon announced it would temporarily disable all payments until more information was available.

Then, in what was described as an unrelated incident, in the midst of the outage, Patreon said a portion of payments were also being erroneously flagged as fraudulent by patron member's banks, apologizing again to users for the inconvenience Thursday.

The company did not say if that issue had been resolved at the time of this report.

On July 24th, the company reported a separate incident with Patreon’s insights dashboard, earnings, and patron counts showing incorrect data.

Patreon said creators were unable to view notifications for about 8 hours, as well as edit various pages and settings on July 22nd, but that the issues had been resolved.

The company also reported having trouble with processing payouts on July 5th.

It’s not clear if any of the previous Patreon issues were related to this week’s outage.

There are currently has close to 250,000 content creators using the service, according to Patreon’s website.