Your online store down? Can't get to your fave web shop? Maybe blame Shopify
Biz races to fix broken systems
Shopify suffered an outage today, preventing shoppers from using affected merchants.
For those who don't know: Shopify lets shop owners set up customizable storefronts online, and it handles things like their payments, shipments, marketing, and analytics. The biz has said it has more than a million businesses on its books.
Shopify's status page today acknowledgeed: "Some merchants and customers are experiencing issues accessing the storefront."
We're told the downtime started around 1252 PT (2052 UTC). Shopify gave folks some hope, noting on its status page: "We’ve identified the problem with merchants' storefronts showing an error and we’re working on a solution."
Over on Twitter, it added: "We are aware that some merchant storefronts are not loading at this time. Our developers are working to resolve this ASAP. Apologies for any inconvenience."
And over on Downdetector, you can see the extent of the IT breakdown: thousands of complaints just in the past few minutes.
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While some said the service was returning to normal, others were upset at lost sales and the inconvenience.
"Front end completely down," wrote one merchant going by the name Jenna. "I had a huge collection launching at 4PM EST and it stopped working RIGHT before the launch." Another chimed in: "It crashed 15 minutes AFTER my product launch today."
Another, called Rich, presumably referring to the upcoming Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas shopping seasons, fumed:
Shopify always does this right at the holiday time (USA) they tinker with new features and updates and then FUBAR the site. I have a checkout every 7 minutes from a "New" visitor, so this lost revue and a lost customer that I will never get back. Admin going down I can live with but when they don't have a triple redundancy on a store front, it is inexcusable!
Shopify - SAVE YOUR UPDATES AND CHANGES FOR AFTER THE HOLIDAYS! Make your platform bulletproof and reliable, and have backup redundancies!
Shopify claimed at 1313 PT that it has resolved whatever brought it down: "A fix has been completely rolled out and the issue has been resolved with storefronts working normally again," the status page read. If you were unable to reach your favorite shop today, or you were left wondering why your online boutique was timing out, now you know: Shopify broke down. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
