Do provider outages consume the retry budget?

That is a setting in the fallback policy of each merchant account, and the right choice depends on the merchant's volume and its tolerance.

Counting downtime attempts

When attempts made during provider downtime count toward the limits, the total number of retries stays in check while a provider is unavailable. A transaction does not keep consuming attempts against a provider that cannot answer, and the policy reaches its end state predictably.

Leaving them out of the count

When downtime attempts do not count, the retry budget is preserved for when the provider comes back. Retries can resume once it is available again, which gives the transaction a fair chance on a working provider.

Choosing between the two

• High-volume merchants often prefer to cap retries, so an outage does not create a wave of repeated attempts.
• Merchants whose payments carry high value, or who rely on a single provider for a method, may prefer to keep the budget for when the provider recovers.

The setting works together with routing and the return code mapping. A retry can be sent to another provider when the issue is with the first one, which often matters more than the budget itself. Platform supervision then shows how deliveries and retries behaved during the incident, so your team can review the outcome afterward.