In Brief

Earlier today, Shopify faced a major outage that disrupted the operations of numerous merchants, leaving them unable to fulfill transactions.

According to Shopify’s status page, the company has found and fixed the issue.

The disruption is particularly problematic given that customers were actively searching for deals on Cyber Monday, one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms for millions of businesses to build and manage online stores. The company reports Shopify merchants handle over 10% of all e-commerce transactions in the U.S.

The issues began surfacing around 6:45 a.m. PT, when select merchants reported difficulties logging into their Shopify accounts. Additionally, many faced challenges accessing point-of-sale (POS) systems, preventing them from processing transactions. 

Shopify’s status page recently confirmed that the company had identified and remedied the cause of the problem: its login authentication flow, which explains the POS login complications. Shopify stated that it’s now seeing signs of recovery and that it will continue monitoring the situation. It also advised merchants that its Help Center was experiencing longer-than-normal wait times for support as a result of today’s outage.

The exact number of affected merchants is unclear. However, Downdetector, a website that tracks user-submitted reports about website issues, noted there were about 4,000 outage incidents.

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