We're very sorry about this. We work hard to maintain extreme reliability in our infrastructure, with a lot of redundancy at different levels. This morning, our API was heavily degraded (though not totally down) for 24 minutes.
We'll be conducting a thorough investigation and root-cause analysis.
Many folks don't have the privilege to run a massive scale operation like Stripe, and lots of people can learn from it.
Someone deleted an index before the replacement was live due to a process error. This had cascading effects across the system and caused a large % of API requests to timeout. It's such a pedestrian problem but had an enormous impact.