Shopify, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms, hit major instability on Cyber Monday. Thousands of merchants immediately felt the impact of the outage on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
The result was login failure, frozen point-of-sale systems, and broad-based delays that left businesses scrambling to assist frustrated customers.
Cyber Monday Platform Failure Affects Merchants Nationwide
According to The Wall Street Journal, small business owners rely heavily on Shopify's seamless transaction process during peak shopping events. However, the disruption stopped many from generating shipping labels, accessing their dashboards, or completing customer checkouts, leading to hours of uncertainty.
Outage tracker Downdetector recorded over 4,000 problem reports just before noon, with thousands more appearing shortly after, signaling a widespread and urgent technical breakdown.
Login Issues and POS Errors Create E-Commerce Chaos
Shopify confirmed early in the afternoon that merchants were having problems across several critical services, including:
- Shopify Admin
- Point of Sale systems
- Mobile apps
- Shopify Support
According to the company's status page, engineers tracked the issue down to Shopify's login authentication flow, which prevented a substantial number of users from accessing their accounts. Teams worked to restore functionality, though pockets of degraded performance continued to persist throughout the system.
Shopify Announces Partial Recovery, but Disruptions Continue
By mid-afternoon, Shopify said services were starting to recover, although full stability had not been reached as of 2:31 PM ET.
"We are seeing signs of recovery for admin and POS login issues now."
Although these are improvements, Shopify warned that wait times for the Help Center were unusually long, which delays the support that merchants can receive. As of 9 PM ET, the platform still had issues currently affecting Point of Sale, API & Mobile, and Support, which left many merchants cautious while traffic remained high.
A Major Setback During a Record-Breaking Sales Weekend
According to Business Insider, the outage came at an especially inopportune time for Shopify, which had just reported a record-breaking $6.2 billion in Black Friday sales, according to company president Harley Finkelstein.
More than 10% of all U.S. e-commerce transactions flow through the platform, so any disruption is a big event with possible ripple effects throughout the retail industry.
Shopify hasn't announced the range of financial impact that the outage caused, but businesses may feel it as they do an accounting of lost sales, delayed shipments, and customer service challenges.
Originally published on Tech Times
