Creators’ earnings on Patreon are randomly disappearing

August 9, 2023

Early this month, Patreon creators noticed their funds were inaccessible. Patreon confirmed that these payments were flagged as fraudulent. The funding platform later announced that it identified issues with Payoneer payouts and temporarily disabled them.

Patreon creators affected due to infrastructure upgrades

According to Jason Pargin, author of John Dies at the End, Patreon canceled all his creator support. The company sent him a link through email to update his payment. However, it leads to a 404 error. The author also can’t access the list of creators he supported. Additionally, in Patreon subreddit, creators also complained of losing as many as 300 patrons.

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

Many creators speculated that the root cause of the issue is the change of billing information to Dublin. According to the email sent by Patreon to Engadget, this location is likely due to the recent upgrade of its payment partner.

On August 3, Patreon posted an update regarding this issue. “We’ve traced the slightly elevated decline rates back to payments infrastructure upgrades required by one of our payment processing partners,” the post reads. The platform advised its creators to contact the card issuer to confirm the validity of the charges or try a different payment method.

Patreon is still currently investigating the issue. Its latest update reads, “We are continuing to investigate declined payments caused by a payments system upgrade required by one of our payment partners. We will be retrying all declined payments caused by this issue throughout the month.”

The response from creators

On the Patreon X (Twitter) account, creators are still complaining that payment retries lead to a blank page. They’re also concerned about whether or not their lost pledges will be recovered. Most complaints say it’s still a payment gateway issue, as the charges never made it to the user’s cards.

Patreon did not set a timeframe on when this issue would be fixed. If you are one of the creators missing your revenue, check this out for more updates or visit the Patreon Support account on X.