Shopify Outage Hits Merchants on Cyber Monday

Shopify, a leading e-commerce platform powering millions of online stores worldwide, experienced a significant outage on Cyber Monday, disrupting merchants' access to their administrative dashboards and point-of-sale systems during one of the year's peak shopping periods.

The issues began around 9:45 a.m. Eastern Time on December 1, affecting users globally, including in the United States, Canada, Colombia, and Argentina. According to outage tracking service Downdetector, thousands of reports flooded in from merchants unable to log in to Shopify's admin panels, process point-of-sale checkouts, or contact support. Shopify confirmed the problems on its status page, stating that some merchants were encountering error messages within their admins and that the company was investigating while applying mitigations. "Merchants may experience issues when trying to login to Shopify, or while attempting to contact Shopify Support," the platform noted in an update. It also advised users to remain logged in on any active devices to minimize disruptions.

The outage primarily impacted store owners rather than shoppers, as storefronts and checkout processes for customers appeared to remain...