Credits Referencing Capture Transactions Failing
Postmortem
February 10, 2026 — Credits Referencing Capture Transactions Failing
High Level Summary
Between approximately 1:56 PM UTC and 4:15 PM UTC on February 5, 2026, credit transactions where the reference transaction was a capture failed with the error "The specified reference_token corresponds to a transaction which cannot be used as a reference."
What Happened
At approximately 1:56 PM UTC on February 5, 2026, Spreedly rolled out a change to support credits on the CyberSource Rest gateway. This included a change in the way we validated reference transaction types used in credits. Specifically, there was an unintended side-effect which caused captures to no longer be treated as a valid reference type for credits on gateways other than CyberSource Rest. Once this was discovered, the code was reverted at 4:01PM UTC. By 4:15 PM UTC, credit requests against captures were fully functional.
Next Steps
- Any credit attempts that failed with this error are safe to retry
- We are making improvements to our code review processes and regression test suite to ensure we catch similar errors before they make it into production
- We have identified a gap in our observability surrounding validation errors that we will be prioritizing
-The Spreedly Team
Resolved
Thank you for your patience.
Monitoring
We’re actively monitoring to ensure credit requests referencing Captures are processing as expected. At this time, we’re not seeing further errors related to this behavior.
Investigating
Some customers may see errors when attempting to issue credits against Capture transactions. Capture transactions themselves are processing successfully.
Our engineering team is actively investigating this behavior to determine the cause and confirm whether this is a regression or an unintended change. We will provide updates as soon as more information is available.