Is Shopify Down? How to Check, and What to Do During a Shopify Outage

October 12, 2026 · 12 min read

To find out whether Shopify is down, open shopifystatus.com and log in with your Shopify account. The public page shows platform-wide status for Storefront, Checkout, Admin and other components. The logged-in view shows status for your own store, and Shopify notes on the page that "some issues affecting a small percentage of stores may not be reflected here." If both views say everything is operational but your store still fails, the cause is most likely on your side: your domain, an app, a theme change or your own network.

During a real Shopify outage you cannot fix the platform. Your job is to confirm the scope within minutes, tell customers and staff something accurate, stop spending on ads that send people to a broken checkout, and reconcile orders and payments once service returns. The runbook below covers those four jobs. Set it up in the weeks before Black Friday (27 November 2026), when an hour of checkout errors costs the most.

At a glance

• Check shopifystatus.com while logged in. The store-specific view can show problems that the public page does not.
• Test from outside your own network: a phone on mobile data, a second region, or an external monitor. Your office Wi-Fi is a sample of one.
• Separate the layers. A storefront that loads does not prove checkout works, and a working admin does not prove buyers can pay.
• Pause paid traffic only after you confirm checkout is failing for buyers.
• After recovery, compare payments captured against orders created. Shopify's own webhooks retry for a limited time, so apps connected to your store can miss events.
• Write the runbook and the customer messages now, while nothing is broken.

Why it matters now

Shopify outages do not happen often, and when they do they are not always platform-wide. Two recent incidents show the pattern:

• On 6 September 2026, Shopify reported that "between 08:34 UTC - 09:34 UTC, we experienced outages for Shopify Admins, storefronts, and checkouts on some stores due to an issue affecting backend services." The first status update said some merchants and buyers "may encounter error messages", so only part of the platform was affected.
• On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare's network failed from 11:20 UTC, with the core outage lasting until 14:30 UTC and full restoration at 17:06 UTC. Cloudflare's post-mortem says users saw HTTP 5xx error pages and that the cause was a database permissions change, not an attack. In December 2025 a merchant on the Shopify Community forum wrote that Cloudflare problems had broken their checkout twice and that "some customers actually paid (money was withdrawn from their bank), but no orders appeared in Shopify."

A merchant could not have prevented either incident. You do control how fast you find out, what you tell customers and whether you check your orders afterwards. With Black Friday on 27 November 2026 and Cyber Monday on 30 November, you have about six weeks to get that in place.

Step-by-step: the first 15 minutes

Work through these in order. Each step narrows the cause.

1. Check the platform. Open shopifystatus.com logged out, then logged in for your store's view. Note which components show problems: Storefront, Checkout, Admin, API & Mobile, Point of Sale, Third party services. Subscribe to updates if you have not already.
2. Test from a second network. Load the storefront on a phone with Wi-Fi turned off. If it works there but not in the office, look at your local network, VPN or DNS cache before blaming Shopify.
3. Test the myshopify.com address. Open your-store.myshopify.com. If it loads but your custom domain does not, the problem is your domain or DNS. Shopify's documentation tells you to point the root domain's A record to 23.227.38.65 and the www CNAME to shops.myshopify.com, and notes that some stores show a different regional IP. Check that nobody changed these records and that the domain has not expired.
4. Walk the purchase path: product page, add to cart, checkout, shipping rates, payment step. Use a real card on a low-priced product and refund it, or use your payment provider's test mode on a development store. Write down the step where it fails and what the error says.
5. Check recent changes: a theme publish, an app install, a script or pixel added in the last few hours. If a change lines up with the start of the errors, roll it back first.
6. Decide and announce. If you have confirmed a platform problem or a checkout failure, move to the response steps below.

The response steps

• Pause or reduce paid campaigns that point at product or checkout pages. Leave brand and organic alone.
• Post a short banner or status message if the storefront loads but checkout fails.
• Tell the support team what to say (templates below) and ask them to log every customer who reports a charge without a confirmation.
• Hold scheduled email and SMS campaigns that would send people to the store during the outage.
• Note the start time in UTC. You will need it for reconciliation.

Who checks what

Risk	Owner	Check	Frequency
Platform outage (Shopify or a CDN in front of it)	Store operator	shopifystatus.com logged in, plus external uptime check	Subscription to status updates; external check every minute
Custom domain or DNS broken	Agency or developer	Custom domain vs myshopify.com address; A and CNAME records	After any DNS change; domain expiry checked monthly
Checkout fails while storefront loads	Ecommerce manager	Test purchase through to payment	Before every campaign launch and daily during peak
Theme or app change breaks pages	Agency or developer	Change log next to error start time	Every deploy
Payment captured, order missing	Finance or operations	Payment provider export vs Shopify orders	After every incident; weekly during peak
Connected apps (ERP, 3PL, email) missed events	Agency or developer	Compare order counts in Shopify vs each system	After every incident

Copyable runbook and customer messages

Paste this into your team's shared notes and fill in the blanks before November.

SHOPIFY OUTAGE RUNBOOK  (store: ____________)

Who decides we are "in an incident": ____________
Backup decision-maker:                ____________
Where we talk during an incident:     ____________

1. Check shopifystatus.com (logged in). Components affected: ______
2. Test storefront from mobile data and from ___________ (second region/monitor)
3. Test https://________.myshopify.com  vs  https://www.________.com
4. Test purchase path. Fails at: product / cart / checkout / shipping / payment
5. Any change in last 4 hours? Theme ___ App ___ Script ___ DNS ___
6. Incident start time (UTC): ________

Actions:
[ ] Pause ad campaigns: ____________ (list account names)
[ ] Hold scheduled email/SMS sends
[ ] Storefront banner on (if storefront loads)
[ ] Support team briefed with templates
[ ] Log of customers reporting "charged, no confirmation"

After recovery:
[ ] Incident end time (UTC): ________
[ ] Payments captured vs orders created for the incident window
[ ] Order counts in ERP / 3PL / email tool vs Shopify for the same window
[ ] Customers contacted about duplicate or orphaned charges
[ ] Ad campaigns and scheduled sends resumed
[ ] Short write-up: what we saw, when we knew, what we changed

Customer reply during the outage:

Thanks for letting us know. Our checkout provider is having a technical
problem right now and some orders are not going through. Please don't
retry the payment yet. If you were charged and didn't get a confirmation
email, reply with your email address and we'll check your order as soon
as service is back. We expect an update by [time, timezone].

Customer reply after the outage, for a charge with no order:

We've checked our records for [time window]. Your payment of [amount]
reached us but the order was not created because of the outage.
We have [created your order #____ / refunded the payment]. Refunds
usually show on your statement within a few business days, depending
on your bank.

Reconciliation after the outage

Recovery on the status page does not mean your data is consistent. Three gaps are common.

First, payments without orders. A buyer pays, the confirmation step fails, and no order exists. Export payment transactions from your payment provider for the incident window, plus a margin of 30 minutes on each side, and match them to Shopify orders by amount, time and customer email. The method is the same one described in our guide to payment-to-order reconciliation.

Second, duplicate charges. Buyers who saw an error often try again. Look for the same email and amount appearing twice within a few minutes.

Third, connected apps that missed events. Shopify's developer documentation says it "retries failed webhook calls up to eight times in a four-hour period", and that an app which goes offline for a long time should recover by "importing the missing data." If your ERP, warehouse or email platform depends on webhooks and the outage affected delivery, compare order counts in each system against Shopify for the incident window. Ask your agency or app vendor how their integration catches up.

Worked scenario (illustrative)

A homeware store on Shopify runs a pre-Black Friday sale on a Thursday evening. The figures below are invented to show the method.

At 19:05 local time the support inbox gets two messages saying checkout shows an error. The operator opens shopifystatus.com, logged in. The public page shows Checkout with a degraded status. The storefront loads on mobile data, the myshopify.com address behaves the same as the custom domain, and nothing was deployed that day. That is enough to call it a platform incident.

The operator pauses the two shopping campaigns, holds an email scheduled for 19:30, adds a banner saying checkout is temporarily unavailable, and sends the support team the first template. Shopify posts a resolution at 20:10.

Next morning, finance exports card payments from 18:30 to 20:40. The export shows 41 captured payments, Shopify shows 37 orders in the same window. Two of the four gaps are duplicate attempts from the same customers, which they refund. The other two are paid orders that were never created. The team creates them by hand and emails both customers. The 3PL's order count matches Shopify's, so no shipments were lost, and no customer is left holding a charge without an order.

Common mistakes

• Trusting the public status page alone. Shopify says itself that issues affecting a small share of stores may not appear there. Use the logged-in view and your own external checks.
• Testing only the homepage. A storefront can load while checkout or a payment method fails. An uptime check on the homepage says nothing about whether customers can pay.
• Leaving ads running into a broken checkout. Every click during the outage costs money and leaves a bad first impression.
• Telling customers to retry. Retries during a payment problem create duplicate charges that you then refund one by one.
• Skipping reconciliation because "it's back now". The orphaned charges are the ones that turn into chargebacks weeks later.

Some limits apply to all of this. You cannot speed up Shopify's fix, and external monitoring tells you that something is wrong, not why the platform failed. A test purchase checks one payment method in one country; buyers using other methods or regions may see different results. Your payment provider's export is the record of what was charged, so the reconciliation step depends on having access to it during peak.

FAQ

How do I know if Shopify is down or just my store?

Check shopifystatus.com while logged in, then test your store on mobile data and on its myshopify.com address. If Shopify reports no problems and the myshopify.com address works while your custom domain fails, look at your DNS records and domain registration. If both addresses fail but the status page is green, look at recent theme or app changes, then contact Shopify Support.

What happens to orders placed during a Shopify outage?

It depends on where the failure happened. If checkout failed before payment, the buyer was not charged and no order exists. If payment went through but order creation failed, you get a charge without an order, and you need to find it by comparing payment provider records with Shopify orders for the incident window.

Should I pause my ads when Shopify is down?

Pause campaigns that send traffic to product or checkout pages once you have confirmed that buyers cannot complete a purchase. If only the admin is affected and customers can still check out, keep campaigns running and check conversion every hour until the incident closes.

Sources

• Shopify Status: https://www.shopifystatus.com/
• Shopify Changelog, "Check your store's status on the updated Shopify Status page" (11 February 2020): https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/check-your-store-s-status-on-the-updated-shopify-status-page
• Shopify status incident of 6 September 2026 (archived update text): https://pulsetic.com/status/shopify/incidents/7006/
• Cloudflare, "Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025": https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/
• Shopify Help Center, connecting a third-party domain manually: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/domains/add-a-domain/connecting-domains/connect-domain-manual
• Shopify developer docs, troubleshooting webhooks: https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/webhooks/troubleshooting-webhooks
• Shopify Community thread on Cloudflare-related checkout failures: https://community.shopify.com/t/cloudflare-broke-our-checkout-twice-lost-sales-customer-complaints-failed-orders-how-to-get-compensation/578534

Last reviewed: 12 October 2026

For a broader plan that covers outages beyond Shopify, see our ecommerce business continuity plan, the third-party dependency map and our outage communication templates.

If you support several Shopify stores, Pingvera can run the outside-in part of step 2 for you: HTTP checks every minute from several regions on both the custom domain and the myshopify.com address, plus DNS, SSL and domain-expiry checks, with a quorum across regions so one bad probe does not page you. Alerts go to email, Telegram or a webhook, and you can publish a white-label status page on your own domain for customers. The Free plan covers up to five sites.

Read next: How to check if a website is really down · Domain expiry: how to check when a domain expires · Know your client's site is down before they call · SSL certificate expired: how to check and never miss the date · Check availability from several regions.