Shopify is down – here's what we know about its Cyber Monday outage

Build vs outsource: Our web hosting expert comments on Shopify outage

Shopify might be an easy and convenient way to manage an online store but when Shopify goes down at critical times of the year it highlights how important it is to have the best web hosting infrastructure.

Using the best ecommerce hosting providers to host your own online store doesn’t need to be complicated either.

ScalaHosting will manage every technical aspect of your site and hosts like Hostinger, SiteGround, and Bluehost have all the tools and support you need to create a WooCommerce store with WordPress.Hosting your own ecommerce store gives you complete control over your site.

Should the worst-case scenario happen during peak trading, you can easily restore your site from a backup and change the server on which your site is hosted. This way, your business is no longer relying on a single platform.

Shopify down reports pouring in from all around the globe

The outage is still going on at the time of writing with no updates yet from Shopify's status page. Shops all around the world are being impacted with the bulk of the reports originating from North America. Below are the screenshots from Downdetector from the US and UK

UK

US

Shopify stores are still up and working

It's important to note that customers can still buy from Shopify. It's just that shop owners cannot access their stores dashboard and backend right now. As James Capell, who heads our Web Hosting division puts it, "it's reassuring to shop owners to know that their customers can still purchase".

Owain Williams, our Website builder lead adds, "this give proof that shoppers aren't impacted". James also did a test purchase just a few minutes ago. "I've also received confirmation that my order has been cancelled via email so; stores seem to be working, checkout, purchase, and cancellations are working (at least for the store I checked)."

This is unfortunate timing

Shopify couldn't really have picked a worse day, other than Black Friday, to have an outage.

A number of frustrated store owners (above) have taken to X to vent their feelings – as one has commented, "as a small business owner this is so bad".

Hopefully, it won't last too much longer – the Shopify status page has it logged as "degraded performance" across areas like "API and mobile" and "Point of Sale", rather than a partial or major outage. But at the time of writing, reports on Downdetector are still on the rise...

What has Shopify said?

Shopify has confirmed on its status page that it has a log-in issue, with the incident report headed saying "some merchants encountering error messages within their admins".

Its latest post around half an hour ago at 10.26am ET / 3.26pm GMT said that "to help avoid complications, please remain logged in on any devices that are currently logged in".

That advice may have come too late for many users, but if you use Shopify it's worth remaining logged in so you're not further hit by the issues. Right now, the reports on Downdetector are unfortunately continuing to climb, with reports in the US close to the 4,000 mark.

A global outage

Shopify is a global e-commerce platform and today's issue are hitting stores around the world. In the US, there have been almost 3,700 reports from frustrated users, while in the UK the reports have stabilized at around 1,300.

The main knock-on effect is Shopify users being unable to log into their accounts and process orders, which is particularly bad timing since it's Cyber Monday and we're running into the holiday season.

Shopify hasn't yet revealed a cause of the issue, but said on its status page at 10.26am ET / 3.26pm GMT that it was "continuing to investigate the current issue".