Is Shopify Down? How to Check and What to Do

Your online store is not loading. Customers cannot check out. The Shopify admin panel is throwing errors. If your business runs on Shopify, every minute of downtime is lost revenue. Before you start troubleshooting your theme or apps, check whether the problem is Shopify itself.

This guide covers how to check if Shopify is down, what typically causes Shopify outages, and what you can do to protect your business while you wait for things to come back.

How to Check if Shopify Is Down

Shopify powers millions of online stores. When their platform has issues, merchants and customers feel it immediately. Here is how to determine whether the problem is on Shopify's end or something specific to your store.

Check the Official Shopify Status Page

Shopify maintains a detailed public status page. Start here.

The page breaks Shopify into components. The storefront (what your customers see) might be working while the admin panel (where you manage orders) is down. Checkout can be affected independently from product pages. During active incidents, Shopify posts timestamped updates explaining what is affected and what they are doing about it.

Shopify also shows a 90-day uptime history, which is useful for understanding whether recent issues are isolated or part of a trend.

Use Is That Down

Is That Down monitors Shopify's status page automatically and sends alerts when incidents are reported. If your revenue depends on Shopify, automated monitoring is far better than manually checking a status page. For a full guide on checking any service's status, see how to check if a service is down.

Check Third-Party Outage Trackers

Downdetector tracks Shopify and shows a real-time graph of user-reported problems. A spike in reports confirms that the issue is widespread. Downdetector also breaks reports into categories like website, checkout, and app, helping you understand the scope.

Check Social Media

Search Twitter/X for "shopify down" or "shopify outage." Merchants are quick to report problems because their livelihoods are on the line. The Shopify Support account (@ShopifySupport) sometimes posts updates during outages. The Shopify community forums are another source of real-time reports from other merchants.

Test Your Store Directly

Open your store's URL in an incognito window. Try adding a product to the cart and starting the checkout process. Try logging into your Shopify admin at admin.shopify.com. If your store loads but the admin does not (or vice versa), you can narrow down which part of Shopify's infrastructure is affected. If another Shopify store you know of has the same problems, the issue is platform-wide.

Common Causes of Shopify Outages

Shopify handles enormous transaction volumes across millions of stores. Here is what typically causes problems.

Checkout and Payment Processing Issues

The checkout system is the most critical part of Shopify's infrastructure. It processes millions of transactions daily and integrates with payment providers, tax calculators, shipping APIs, and fraud detection systems. A failure in any of these components can break checkout. These outages are the most damaging for merchants because they directly prevent sales.

Infrastructure Scaling

Shopify experiences massive traffic spikes during events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, flash sales, and product drops. While Shopify invests heavily in capacity planning (they run extensive load testing before BFCM every year), unexpected traffic patterns or edge cases can still cause degraded performance. Smaller events like a viral product or a celebrity endorsement can also create sudden demand spikes.

Third-Party App Conflicts

Shopify's ecosystem includes thousands of third-party apps. When a widely-used app has a bug or its servers are overloaded, it can slow down storefronts or break functionality for stores using that app. This is not technically a Shopify outage, but it looks and feels like one to affected merchants. If the issue only affects your store, check whether a recently installed or updated app is the cause.

CDN and Network Problems

Shopify uses a global content delivery network to serve storefronts quickly around the world. CDN issues can cause slow page loads, missing images, or complete unavailability in specific regions. These problems are sometimes regional, affecting customers in one country while others shop normally.

Database and Backend Issues

Shopify stores and retrieves enormous amounts of data: products, orders, customer records, inventory levels, and more. Database performance problems can cause slow admin pages, failed order processing, or inventory sync errors. These outages are often partial rather than complete.

What to Do When Shopify Is Down

A Shopify outage means your store is losing money. Here is how to minimize the damage.

Communicate with Your Customers

If your store is unreachable or checkout is broken, let your customers know. Post on your social media accounts (Instagram, Twitter/X, Facebook) that you are aware of the issue and that it will be resolved. Transparency builds trust and can prevent customers from assuming your store is gone for good. Our outage communication guide has templates you can adapt for customer-facing messages.

Do Not Make Changes to Your Store

It is tempting to start troubleshooting by changing your theme, removing apps, or editing settings. Do not do this during a platform-wide Shopify outage. You risk introducing new problems on top of the existing ones. Wait until Shopify confirms the incident is resolved before making changes.

Document the Impact

Track how long the outage lasts and estimate the revenue impact. Shopify offers SLA credits for extended outages under certain plans, and having documentation helps if you need to file a claim. Check your analytics to see normal traffic and conversion rates for the same time period to calculate estimated losses.

Consider Backup Sales Channels

If Shopify checkout is down but your website is loading, you can direct customers to purchase through other channels.

Social media shops. If you have Instagram Shopping or Facebook Shops set up, direct customers there.

Manual orders. For high-value items, take orders via email or direct message and process them manually once Shopify recovers.

Amazon or Etsy. If you sell on multiple platforms, point customers to your listings there.

Monitor Recovery

Keep shopifystatus.com open. Once Shopify reports recovery, test your store thoroughly before assuming everything is back to normal. Check that checkout works, orders are processing, and inventory levels are correct. Payment processing should be verified with a small test transaction.

How to Get Notified About Future Shopify Outages

Every minute between an outage starting and you finding out about it is a minute of lost sales you cannot act on. Here is how to close that gap.

Subscribe to the Shopify status page. The status page offers email subscriptions and an RSS/Atom feed. Subscribe to get notified the moment Shopify reports an incident.

Use automated monitoring. Is That Down monitors Shopify's status page and sends alerts through email, Slack, or webhooks. Automated monitoring means you find out about outages within minutes, giving you time to communicate with customers and activate your backup plan. For a full alerting setup guide, see our vendor monitoring guide.

Set up synthetic monitoring for your store. In addition to monitoring Shopify's status page, set up uptime monitoring for your specific store URL. Sometimes your store can be affected by issues that do not show up on the platform-wide status page. Monitoring your store directly catches these cases.

Build a Shopify outage playbook. Document the steps your team should take when Shopify goes down. Who communicates with customers? Who monitors the status page? What backup sales channels can you activate? Having this written down in advance means faster response when it matters. Our vendor outage response playbook provides a template you can customize.

Recent Notable Shopify Outages

June 2023 Checkout Outage

In June 2023, Shopify experienced a significant outage that affected checkout across many stores. Customers could browse products and add items to their carts, but the checkout process failed. The issue lasted several hours during business hours, which made it particularly costly for merchants. Shopify confirmed the incident on their status page and resolved it the same day, but the timing meant many merchants lost a full afternoon of sales.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2022 Intermittent Issues

During the 2022 Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, some Shopify merchants reported intermittent slowdowns and occasional checkout errors. While Shopify did not experience a full outage, the degraded performance during the highest-traffic shopping period of the year was significant. Shopify addressed the issues within hours, but the incident highlighted the importance of having contingency plans in place for peak sales periods.

References

• Shopify Status Page - Official real-time status for all Shopify services.
• Shopify Help Center - Official support documentation and troubleshooting.

Beyond vendor monitoring, consider uptime monitoring for your own storefront and SSL monitoring to catch certificate issues that can block checkout.