Stripe Webhook Debugging Guide

Many engineers first notice Stripe webhook problems when something downstream breaks:

• Customer paid but account is still inactive
• Subscription cancelled but access remains active
• Invoices marked unpaid even after payment

These symptoms usually mean the webhook event was not processed correctly.

Step 1: Check the Stripe delivery log

The first place to investigate is the Stripe dashboard webhook log.

Stripe records every delivery attempt, including:

• HTTP response code
• delivery timestamp
• retry attempts
• response time

If Stripe is retrying an event repeatedly, the endpoint is returning an error or timing out.

Step 2: Look for timeout problems

Stripe expects webhook endpoints to respond quickly. Slow database queries or synchronous API calls can cause the request to exceed Stripe’s timeout window.

When this happens, Stripe retries the event automatically.

Repeated retries often indicate that heavy processing should be moved into background workers.

Step 3: Confirm your worker queue is running

Many webhook handlers only enqueue jobs and return immediately.

If background workers crash or stop running, webhook requests may appear successful while the real business logic never executes.

This creates silent failures where Stripe shows a successful delivery but the application state never updates.

Step 4: Make webhook processing idempotent

Stripe retries failed events automatically. If your webhook logic is not idempotent, retries can create duplicate side effects.

Common examples include:

• Duplicate subscription activation
• Multiple invoice updates
• Repeated provisioning jobs

The safest approach is storing processed event IDs and ignoring duplicates.

See our guide on implementing idempotent webhooks in Laravel .