Guide to Investigating and Escalating Plaid Issues
Last updated: August 25, 2026
This guide covers how to identify the type of Plaid issue a business owner is reporting, gather the details needed to investigate it, and escalate to Plaid when the issue is on their end.
Business owners escalating Plaid issues
When a business owner escalates an issue related to their financial institution, it’s important to thoroughly read their message to understand and determine the exact issue they're encountering.
Plaid issues fall into one of the following categories, and the path to investigate and resolve each one is different:
Authentication & connectivity: An error when linking or relinking
Missing data: Missing or stale transactions or accounts that aren’t appearing as available to link
Faulty data: Account or transaction data that doesn't match the financial institution
Ensure the business owner doesn’t unlink/relink
Business owners should not unlink accounts as a troubleshooting step except in very specific cases that warrant it like INVALID_UPDATED_USERNAME. Unlinking and relinking an account can lead to duplicates and altered tranStartDates. When business owners escalate an issue, make sure they don’t try to resolve it themselves by unlinking and relinking, unless the UI directs them to do so.
Additional details to collect from the business owner
Depending on the issue, it’s important to collect relevant details from the business owner up-front to facilitate the investigation. These details include:
Always: Name of the financial institution
For missing transactions: 2-3 examples of missing transaction that are more than 5 business days old and which account they’re associated with
For missing accounts: last 4 digits of the missing account(s)
For errors: Error message (screenshot of this including the timestamp is ideal)
Gathering the information needed to investigate
Once the type of issue is determined and the relevant details have been provided by the business owner, look up relevant details to help with the investigation. This is the same information Tight uses internally to investigate Plaid issues, so it's worth building visibility in-house so the team can self-serve.
Locating the financial institution and account details
Call Tight’s GET /accounts endpoint to locate details like the status/apiStatus, apiAccountId, apiAccountType, createdDate, lastApiSyncedDate, latestTransactionDate, tranStartDate, tranMinStartDate, and isSupported.
Call Tight’s GET /integrations endpoint to locate details like the apiAccessToken, apiInstitutionName, and apiErrorCode.
For missing transaction cases, call Plaid’s transactions/get endpoint to confirm that the transaction exists in Plaid, then call Tight’s POST /banks/getTransactions endpoint and search for the transaction in the response.
When a Plaid error occurs during the link flow via the Tight SDK, the exitCallback is invoked. It contains an error object representing the Plaid Error, which includes details like request_id and link_session_id. This argument will be null if the user simply exited Plaid Link without an error.
Investigating Plaid issues
Initial investigation with Plaid’s built-in tools
The Item Debugger is Plaid's own diagnostic view for a single financial institution. Navigate to the Item Debugger in the Plaid Dashboard, then enter the item ID, access token, link token, or link session ID.
The tool will show:
Whether the financial institution is currently in an error state, and the error code if so
The status of each account
When the financial institution last updated successfully
Which products are consented for the financial institution
The current status of the financial institution's integration
It's best practice to check the Item Debugger before opening a case with Plaid. It's the fastest way to confirm whether a financial institution is genuinely in an error state, when the connection last worked, and whether transactions have stopped arriving at Plaid rather than downstream.
Investigating authentication & connectivity issues
ITEM_LOGIN_REQUIRED
The most common state to encounter is ITEM_LOGIN_REQUIRED. This occurs when a business owner's financial institution requests a credential re-validation for security purposes. It may be triggered by a change in the business owner's credentials, or may occur if the business owner has not validated their credentials in a while. While the account is in this state, transactions cannot be pulled in. The business owner will see a prompt to relink in the UI and should follow it. Once successfully relinked, the error will resolve and their transactions will resume pulling in.
Note: If the business owner has multiple financial institutions linked, more than one may be in this state and they would need to go through the flow for each institution to resolve the error.
Persistent MFA reset errors
Occasionally, there can be an issue referred to as persistent MFA reset. In this case, the business owner's financial institution continues to hit the ITEM_LOGIN_REQUIRED error even after they successfully relink it. This issue would need to be escalated with Plaid to resolve.
Wide-spread institution issues
The institution status page shows whether a financial institution is experiencing institution-wide issues. This is worth checking before opening any case involving a link or relink failure, particularly INVALID_CREDENTIALS and INSTITUTION_NOT_RESPONDING.
If it's a widely reported error Plaid is already aware of for a large financial institution (e.g., Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc.), there is no need to report this error. Instead:
Alert the rest of the support team so they recognize it when it comes in again.
Create internal tracking for impacted business owners to keep track of anyone who reaches out with the same issue.
Follow up with everyone affected once the error with their financial institution is resolved.
Other authentication & connectivity errors
These are the other authentication & connectivity errors that may come up, along with how to resolve each:
Confirm that the business owner is selecting the correct integration and entering the credentials exactly as they do to log into their financial institution's website.
Sometimes stored passwords can cause errors, so the business owner should manually type in their username/password.
If the business owner confirms these things and is still hitting the error, this indicates an erroneous error on Plaid’s end that would need to be escalated with Plaid to resolve.
INSTITUTION_NOT_RESPONDING or INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR
This error indicates an issue with the integration for the business owner’s financial institution and would need to be escalated with Plaid to resolve.
This may or may not be a valid error.
The business owner should first confirm whether they enabled security settings in their banking portal that are not supported by Plaid.
If so, they may wish to disable them in order to be able to link their account.
If they don’t have something like this enabled or if they’re not sure, this would need to be escalated with Plaid to resolve.
Confirm with the business owner that they still have active accounts with this financial institution.
If they no longer have accounts at that financial institution, the financial institution should be unlinked.
If the account is still active, this would need to be escalated with Plaid to resolve.
This error indicates that the business owner has changed their banking login username since they initially linked their account.
To resolve, the business owner will need to completely unlink (i.e. delete) the financial institution, then re-add it using their new credentials. This is one of the only situations where a business owner would need to unlink their bank to resolve the issue.
Investigating missing data issues
Missing or stale transactions
Before investigating further, confirm the transactions are indeed missing by checking for the examples provided by the business owner. If they can’t be located, then continue the investigation by looking into the following:
Check for an error state
If the financial institution is in an ITEM_LOGIN_REQUIRED state, the business owner needs to relink their institution to resume pulling in transactions.
Refresh, then check again
Click the refresh icon on the Banks & Integrations screen in the UI or hit the POST /v5/banks/refresh endpoint, then look to see if the transactions are still missing.
Check the last date a transaction pulled in
Transactions may take up to 5 business days to pull in from Plaid, so anything more recent than that is expected.
Note: Business days do not include weekends or holidays. When there are holiday weekends, the transactions may not pull in as quickly as the business owner expects, so it's important to verify that the missing transactions are from more than 5 business days ago before opening a Plaid case.
Check the tranStartDate
Only transactions on and after the tranStartDate will pull in. If transactions are missing from before that date, adjust the tranStartDate.
Of note, Tight uses authorizedDate for credit cards and date (the posted date) for bank accounts, so take that into consideration when determining if the tranStartDate is set correctly.
Check whether the transactions were deleted/archived in the UI
A true Plaid issue usually affects every transaction from that account. If the business owner is only missing one or two but sees later transactions it’s possible the transactions were mistakenly deleted.Check the Archived section to confirm.
Check the account's apiType and apiSubType
Unsupported types don't pull transactions.
Currently, only the following account apiType and apiSubType values are supported to pull in transactions:
apiType - DEPOSITORY, CREDIT, OTHER
apiSubType - CHECKING, SAVINGS, PAYPAL, PREPAID, PREPAID_DEBIT, CREDIT_CARD, LINE_OF_CREDIT, REWARDS
Once all of the above has been reviewed and it’s confirmed that the transaction(s) are indeed missing, open a missing transactions case with Plaid.
Missing Accounts
Sometimes business owners may not see all of the accounts they want to link at a particular financial institution. When this occurs:
Confirm that the missing account is under the same login credentials as the accounts they currently have linked from that financial institution.
If they are not under the same credentials, explain that currently it's only possible to link one login per institution, which is why the other account cannot be linked.
If they confirm that the account is under the same credentials as their other accounts that are linked, then this issue would need to be escalated with Plaid to resolve. In order to open this case, the last 4 digits of the missing account would be needed.
Investigating faulty data issues
If a business owner notices an issue with transaction data or account data not matching what they expect, this would need to be escalated with Plaid.
For example, if the business owner's account is showing up as 0000, but on their financial institution's website they see the correct last 4 digits of 1234, then this may be an issue where Plaid is not displaying the correct data. On the transaction side, the business owner may notice an incorrect vendor name or other details about the transaction that don't match up with what they see on their financial institution's website/bank statement.
Escalating an issue with Plaid
If it’s been determined the error is on Plaid’s end, open a support case with Plaid.
To open support case with Plaid:
Navigate to the Create case section
Add an identifier such as an Access Token, Link session ID or request_id.
In the Type section (disregard the ‘Instant help’ option), use the drop-down to select the ‘Issue type’:
Authentication & connectivity
Missing data
Faulty data
Complete the required fields like a subject for the case and all the relevant details about the case
Note all actions a business owner has taken in this message.
Be sure to include the name of the bank in the case title, as this can make it easier to locate later.
Once the case is open:
Tell the business owner it’s been escalated to their bank
If they ask, they do not need to take any additional action or reach out to their bank.
Never tell a business owner to fully unlink/relink their account
This risks creating duplicates and will not resolve a Plaid issue.
One of the only exceptions is in the case of an INVALID_UPDATED_USERNAME error, which does require a full unlink and relink.
Record the case on the internal ticket
e.g., opened Plaid case on month/day/year - case #XXXXX - [name of case], and link to it. This will make it easier to follow up on the case and track updates.
Watch out for updates from Plaid
Once available, Plaid will share updates or ETAs for the case.
Keep the business owner posted as updates are received.
Verify the fix before replying
If applicable (like in missing transaction cases), when Plaid says they fixed the issue, check the business owner's account to confirm the transactions are present. Only then follow up with the business owner.