Shopify fixes Cyber Monday outage that left merchants scrambling
A glitch in Shopify’s login system shut merchants out at the worst possible moment, though the platform says everything is now back on track.
If you were wondering why some online stores felt unusually slow or completely unresponsive on Cyber Monday, it wasn’t your Wi-Fi. Shopify, the backbone of about 5.8 million active online businesses, went down on Monday morning, right in the middle of one of the biggest shopping days of the year.
For several hours, many merchants couldn’t log in to their dashboards or access their point-of-sale systems on Shopify. And if you’re trying to run limited-time deals, fulfill a rush of orders, or process in-store payments, losing access on Cyber Monday is the kind of scenario nobody wants to imagine.
Louis Eriakha
Shopify later confirmed that the issue came from its login authentication system. A problem in that part of the platform prevented merchants from signing in at all, and the same failure spread to POS hardware. In short, a single login issue froze a huge slice of e-commerce during the busiest shopping morning of the year.
A few hours into the outage, Shopify updated its status page to say it had identified the problem and deployed a fix. The company said it was seeing signs of recovery and continued monitoring in case any residual issues remained.
Downdetector logged around 4,000 outage reports during the peak. The true number of affected businesses is much higher, since Shopify powers more than 10% of all online retail in the United States. When a platform this large goes down, the impact hits both global brands and tiny independent shops.
Emmanuel Umahi
Cyber Monday isn’t a normal sales day. It’s the day when every second of uptime matters and when outages can cause massive spikes in abandoned carts and customer frustration. Merchants who rely entirely on Shopify for storefronts or POS systems felt the shock immediately.
The outage shows the fragile side of modern retail. Millions of businesses depend on a few core platforms, and when those platforms falter, the domino effect is instant. The system is powerful enough to handle billions of transactions, but that also means everything depends on a single point of failure.
The takeaway
Shopify moved quickly to fix the issue, but the timing was rough. Cyber Monday outages reveal how dependent online commerce has become on centralized systems. For many sellers, this will spark conversations about backups, diversified tools, and what to do when the tech holding your entire business suddenly stops working.
For now, Shopify says things are stable again. But merchants will be watching closely as the rest of the day unfolds.
Emmanuel Umahi
