Business owners around the world have reacted with outrage after major E-commerce platform Shopify experienced widespread outages for hours on Cyber Monday – one of the busiest online retail days of the year.
Thousands of stores started reporting problems with logging into their accounts at around 9 a.m. ET, with social media users calling the incident as “embarrassing.”
“We're aware of an issue with Admins impacting selected stores, and are working to resolve it,” the company wrote on X. “For the most up-to-date information, please refer to our status page at http://shopifystatus.com. Thank you for your patience.”
At its peak around 11 a.m. ET, more than 4,000 retailers reported issues with the site, according to Downdetector.com.
The Canadian firm is one of the world’s largest independent E-commerce platforms, with over five million customers, and processed almost $300 billion in transactions in 2024, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Thought it is hailed as being an easy place for small businesses to create and run online stores, it is also home to major retailers including Nestlé, PepsiCo, Kraft, Heinz, Whole Foods and Red Bull.
At 2.30 p.m. ET Shopify announced that a fix had been implemented and that it was monitoring the results.
“We have found and fixed an issue with our login authentication flow, and are seeing signs of recovery for admin and POS login issues now,” the company posted in an update shortly after. “We are continuing to monitor recovery.”
In a later update, Shopify added: “We had a system degradation that has now been mitigated. We kept checkout and storefronts online, but access to admin interfaces was temporarily unavailable for some merchants.
“This briefly extended to POS but was quickly resolved. We are continuing to monitor the recovery of the current issue. We will provide an update once we have new information.”
Despite efforts to bring the platform back online, users were unimpressed.
“Shopify going down on Cyber Monday has got to be one of the biggest fails of the year,” one user wrote on X.
Cyber Monday is a major online shopping event that takes place on the Monday after Thanksgiving in the U.S., where retailers offer big online discounts, deals, and promotions.
Another added: “How embarrassing @Shopify has been down all morning on literally the biggest sales day of the year for online shops, specifically SMALL BUSINESSES. They should refund EVERYONES fees this month.”
A third, who uses the platform for their own business, added: “Absolutely wild that it's been over 2 hours of Shopify Admin being down on Cyber Monday. 2 hours.
“I had almost everything planned and automated ahead of time, but can imagine many merchants are suffering, unable to edit prices or text on their theme or things like that.”
The Independent has contacted Shopify for updates on the outage and on the suspected cause.
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