An “upgrade” to online payment systems in Dublin appears to have caused a widespread issue for a number of creators and patrons this week on the popular artistic funding platform Patreon.
Numerous Patreon creators posted this week to social media platforms that payments from their patrons had been declined or flagged as fraudulent. Affected customers were then deleted from their supporters’ list, they claimed.
One Reddit user said they had lost 300 of their Patreon supporters, and author Dr Brooke Magnanti posted on Bluesky that she had lost 80 per cent of her patrons.
Author Jason Pargin tweeted on Wednesday that credit card payments to the people he supported were cancelled after being flagged to Patreon as fraudulent: “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,” he said.
Patreon is one of the most widely used platforms for creators to sell their content. Among other content, it is used by numerous podcasts to sell subscriber-only episodes, including The Second Captain’s Podcast and Newstalk’s Golf Weekly. Since its 2013 launch, it has become a complementary and sometimes primary source of income for hundreds of thousands of content creators. According to the company, it has more than 210,000 creators and six million “patrons”, or paying supporters of those creators.
Patreon had “identified an issue with Payoneer payouts”, it said on its website on Wednesday. By Thursday, it had “traced the slightly elevated decline rates back to payments infrastructure upgrades required by one of our payment processing partners”, it said.
A Patreon spokeswoman told news site Engadget that the Dublin operations of a payments partner company seemed to have been implicated in the problem after Patreon “made a required upgrade with one of our payment processing partners” which “may have changed the descriptors people are used to seeing in their statements. We are working closely with this payment processing partner to resolve the issue.” The partner remains unidentified by Patreon.
Patreon indicated on its blog that while Payoneer payments had been restored for the “majority” of creators, it could take time for the systems fix to update across the internet and cards might continue to be declined. It was “deeply sorry for the inconvenience,” it added.
Payoneer did not immediately respond to a query.
This article was updated on August 10th
