Shopify's Cyber Monday Outage Leaves Thousands of Merchants in the Dark
As shoppers eagerly dived into the holiday shopping frenzy on Cyber Monday, many were left in the dark due to issues with Shopify, the ecommerce platform that powers a significant portion of online transactions in the US. According to Shopify's support page, some merchants were struggling to log into their platforms, experiencing outages with checkout and admin systems.
Shopify's point-of-sale (POS), API, and mobile as well as support systems also suffered from "degraded performance." The company acknowledged the issue, stating that they were investigating and applying mitigations for the problems affecting access to Admins and POS systems. However, it was unclear when these issues would be resolved.
In an update posted at 12:39PM ET, Shopify revealed that they had found and fixed an issue with login authentication flow, indicating signs of recovery for admin and POS login issues. The company assured that merchants may still experience problems with POS checkouts due to the ongoing struggles with accessing POS systems.
The outage, which began shortly after morning rush hour, seemed to have a minimal impact on the majority of shoppers who managed to navigate through it without major hiccups. Despite its widespread use by prominent brands such as Netflix, Mattel, Supreme, Glossier, and Converse, Shopify's own customer support team was criticized for being slow to respond to the issue.
As the day wore on, Shopify continued to update its status page with progress updates, reassuring users that they were working tirelessly to resolve the problems. With many stores now back online, it appears that the impact of the outage may have been minimal, but for those affected, it was a frustrating start to what should be an otherwise enjoyable shopping experience.
In related news, Shopify's social media team seemed tone deaf, tweeting about their readiness to handle the anticipated influx of holiday shoppers just days before the issue arose. A post from November 27 stated that their team was prepared for the "Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping rush," with an average wait time of 56 seconds at the time.
As shoppers eagerly dived into the holiday shopping frenzy on Cyber Monday, many were left in the dark due to issues with Shopify, the ecommerce platform that powers a significant portion of online transactions in the US. According to Shopify's support page, some merchants were struggling to log into their platforms, experiencing outages with checkout and admin systems.
Shopify's point-of-sale (POS), API, and mobile as well as support systems also suffered from "degraded performance." The company acknowledged the issue, stating that they were investigating and applying mitigations for the problems affecting access to Admins and POS systems. However, it was unclear when these issues would be resolved.
In an update posted at 12:39PM ET, Shopify revealed that they had found and fixed an issue with login authentication flow, indicating signs of recovery for admin and POS login issues. The company assured that merchants may still experience problems with POS checkouts due to the ongoing struggles with accessing POS systems.
The outage, which began shortly after morning rush hour, seemed to have a minimal impact on the majority of shoppers who managed to navigate through it without major hiccups. Despite its widespread use by prominent brands such as Netflix, Mattel, Supreme, Glossier, and Converse, Shopify's own customer support team was criticized for being slow to respond to the issue.
As the day wore on, Shopify continued to update its status page with progress updates, reassuring users that they were working tirelessly to resolve the problems. With many stores now back online, it appears that the impact of the outage may have been minimal, but for those affected, it was a frustrating start to what should be an otherwise enjoyable shopping experience.
In related news, Shopify's social media team seemed tone deaf, tweeting about their readiness to handle the anticipated influx of holiday shoppers just days before the issue arose. A post from November 27 stated that their team was prepared for the "Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping rush," with an average wait time of 56 seconds at the time.