You may have noticed that half the internet was down yesterday—social media apps, email providers, and thousands of websites were all unavailable during the largest internet disruption in over a year.
Now for the good news: All Planning Center products and systems are fully operational, and any tasks or automations that were delayed by the outage are caught up—including recurring donations.
To all the churches who cheered us on and made a tough day better… thank you.
If you’re still getting up to speed, here’s an overview of what happened and what measures we’ve taken to get our tools back up and running for your ministry.
You can also skip to frequently asked questions below.
Here’s what happened—and when
You can see the full breakdown of what was happening in our products on our status page, but here are the highlights from yesterday, October 20,2025:
12 a.m. PT: Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage begins, impacting Planning Center products and causing scheduled tasks to fail.
12–5 a.m. PT: Our system was fully offline and inaccessible to churches. After 5:07 a.m., systems begin gradually recovering.
6:41–10:40 p.m. PT: All Planning Center systems were fully operational and all delayed tasks ran successfully—including recurring donations.
If you keep seeing unexpected behavior in your account from the outage, please clear your browser’s cache and cookies: Chrome / Safari.
What was impacted during the AWS outage
During this outage, Planning Center organizations may have experienced one or more of the following disruptions:
New (one-time) donations could not be submitted
Unsuccessful logins to all Planning Center products
Edits to People profiles could not be made
The Church Center mobile app was inaccessible to congregants
All accounts are fully operational, and automated tasks are completed
Your account is now fully operational, and all scheduled actions that were impacted during the AWS incident are now complete. This includes:
Scheduled recurring donations in Giving have been processed
Scheduled list refreshes in People are completed
Scheduled emails in Services have been sent
New recurring event sessions are completed
Reminders for taking group event attendance
Other queued automations and background tasks
No automated action in your account will be lost; all recurring donations have been processed, and all scheduled background tasks have been completed as expected.
As these systems have come back online, you may see a backlog of emails now being delivered to your staff and/or congregation. We understand this can be confusing, and we apologize for any additional confusion this may have caused.
Frequently asked questions
These have been the most commonly asked questions during this outage, and what we’ve heard from our customers so far.
What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)? The world’s largest cloud server platform.
AWS is the most trusted provider of cloud storage and computer serving in the world. While yesterday’s outage was a global disruption to the internet, AWS is a trusted resource. They have 99% historical reliability and incidents like this are very rare.
AWS still provides us with the best and fastest solution to provide overall reliable software week-to-week.
Will this ever happen again? Planning Center is committed to keeping our system operational.
During a server outage, our goal is to keep as many of our products and operations as functional as possible.
We did everything we could to keep as many of our products online and operational (even if at a slower pace) throughout the outage and get everything back online as soon as we could.
Was my congregation impacted? Possibly yes, since most Planning Center features and systems were affected.
The AWS outage impacted the Church Center mobile app and web, Services mobile app, Check-Ins mobile app, and others.
Your congregation may not have been able to donate, see songs and plans in Services, sign up for events, or use Check-ins during the outage. However, all of these operations are now fully online.
Is my account working now? Yes, all products and mobile apps are fully online.
By 10:15 p.m. PT on October 20, 2025, all Planning Center systems were fully operational, and all paused automations were run and refreshed.
This means all of our products and mobile apps are fully online and available, and your automated operations scheduled during the outage are complete, including:
Scheduled recurring donations in Giving have been processed
Scheduled list refreshes in People are completed
Scheduled emails in Services have been sent
New recurring event sessions are completed
Reminders for taking group event attendance
Other queued automations and background tasks
Still having issues? You may need to clear your browser cache to see the changes.
If you continue to see unexpected behavior in your account from the outage, please clear your browser’s cache and cookies: Chrome / Safari. If you are still having issues after taking these steps, reach out to our support team at support@planningcenter.com.
Where can I learn about future irregularities? Our status page!
We update this status page whenever something impacts our system. It’s the most accurate reflection of what’s going on in our products at any given time. You can also check out our community to see if any other customers are experiencing what you are!
Additionally, you can always contact our Support team by clicking the question mark in the top right-hand corner of any product or emailing us at support@planningcenter.com.
Reliability is a top priority for us, and we apologize for the disruption that this caused for your church and staff.
The Planning Center Team