Stripe event: payment_intent.requires_action, the customer must authenticate, your server cannot

TL;DR

For "payment_failed": set a sane expiry on your resume link and let the webhook tell you the outcome.

payment_failed

Steps

1. Treating this as a failure and emailing "your payment failed." The payment is in limbo, not dead, and telling the customer it failed sends them to a competitor. The other trap: polling the PaymentIntent in a tight loop waiting for the customer. Set a sane expiry on your resume link and let the webhook tell you the outcome.

When to use

You are seeing this: The PaymentIntent is waiting on the customer, typically 3D Secure authentication. Use this skill when you run into "Stripe event: paymentintent.requiresaction, the customer must authenticate, your server cannot".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

Stripe's event reference says paymentintent.requiresaction occurs when a PaymentIntent transitions to requiresaction state. Verified live at https://docs.stripe.com/api/events/types. nextaction on the PaymentIntent object is the documented carrier of what the customer must do.