Shopify Cyber Monday Outage 2025: What’s Happening, How Bad It Is, and What Merchants Should Do Now

On Cyber Monday 2025, one of the most important days of the year for online retail, Shopify is grappling with a live outage that’s disrupting merchants around the world. Store owners are reporting that they can’t log into their admin dashboards, some are seeing errors on storefronts and point‑of‑sale (POS) systems, and support channels are slowed or unreachable — all while consumer spending is on track to break records. ^[1]

Below is a full rundown of what we know so far on December 1, 2025, plus practical steps merchants can take right now and what this incident might mean for Shopify’s crucial holiday quarter.

Is Shopify down right now? The state of the outage

Timeline: when the Shopify outage started

Reports of problems began on Cyber Monday morning in North America. TechRadar notes that merchants started experiencing login issues around 9:08 a.m. ET (2:08 p.m. GMT), with thousands of stores unable to access their accounts. ^[2]

Shopify’s own status page then confirmed an incident titled “Some merchants encountering error messages within their admins”:

09:47 a.m. ET – Shopify reported that merchants “may experience issues when trying to login to Shopify,” adding that POS, mobile login, and access to Shopify Support could also be affected. ^[3]
09:54 a.m. ET – The company said it was investigating and would provide updates. ^[4]
10:26 a.m. ET – Shopify advised merchants already logged in to stay logged in on all devices to avoid additional complications, confirming the incident was still under investigation. ^[5]

As of early afternoon on December 1, the incident remains listed as unresolved, with several core components — including Admin, API & Mobile, Support and POS — marked as experiencing degraded performance. Storefront and checkout are still labeled “operational,” though merchant reports suggest the real‑world impact is more nuanced. ^[6]

How widespread is the Shopify outage?

Multiple outlets and monitoring services indicate that the disruption is global:

Ynetnews reports that merchants across a diverse list of countries — including Portugal, Lebanon, Estonia, South Korea, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, France, Italy, and Costa Rica — have been affected, with both admin and some storefronts timing out or failing to load. ^[7]
TechRadar describes the disruption as a “global outage,” citing thousands of user reports in the US and UK alone and highlighting that stores can’t log in or process orders properly on the biggest online shopping day of the year. ^[8]
German IT publication it‑daily.net reports “large login problems” at Shopify and notes “several thousand” outage reports on Downdetector, with Shopify confirming on X that it’s aware of admin issues affecting some stores. ^[9]

On Downdetector, Shopify is currently flagged as having ongoing problems. A majority of users are reporting issues with login, but substantial shares also cite website and server connection problems. Recent comments show merchants in France, Mexico, Colombia and the US saying that admin won’t load, they’re looping on login pages, or POS briefly dropped, even as some report that customer‑facing storefronts still appear to be processing orders. ^[10]

What exactly is broken?

Putting the various signals together, the present picture looks like this:

Most affected:
- Logging into Shopify Admin via web
- Accessing some admin pages and reports
- Shopify Support and Help Center access
- Shopify POS and mobile login for some merchants
Partially affected / inconsistent:
- Shopify mobile admin app (working for some merchants as a workaround, failing for others) ^[11]
- Order visibility and synchronization between channels
Reported as operational (but still being watched):
- Storefront and checkout, according to Shopify’s status page, though isolated payment and checkout issues are mentioned in user comments. ^[12]

Crucially, this is not yet being described as a full platform blackout: in many cases, customers can still browse and check out, while merchants are locked out of the tools they rely on to manage orders, inventory, discounts and customer service.

Why this timing is disastrous: Cyber Monday 2025 by the numbers

Cyber Monday 2025 is set to break spending records

Today’s outage isn’t happening on just any Monday. According to Adobe Analytics, U.S. consumers are expected to spend about $14.2 billion online on Cyber Monday 2025, a roughly 6.3% increase over last year. ^[13]

That forecast follows a blockbuster weekend:

Black Friday 2025 online sales in the U.S. hit around $11.8 billion, a new record, signaling strong consumer appetite despite economic uncertainty. ^[14]
Adobe expects peak Cyber Monday spending between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., when shoppers are projected to be spending tens of millions of dollars per minute. ^[15]

At the same time, AI‑driven shopping and discovery tools are surging. Adobe estimates AI‑generated traffic to retail sites could be up more than six‑fold versus 2024, while Shopify’s own 2025 Global Holiday Retail Report finds that around 64% of shoppers plan to use AI tools for holiday shopping inspiration this season, rising to 84% among 18–24‑year‑olds. ^[16]

In other words: millions of shoppers are actively being driven toward digital storefronts at precisely the moment Shopify’s backend is stuttering.

Shopify merchants were coming off a record Black Friday

Shopify entered Cyber Monday with strong momentum:

The company says merchants processed about $6.2 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) on Black Friday 2025 alone, up roughly 25% year‑on‑year. ^[17]
In 2024, Shopify merchants generated a record $11.5 billion in sales over the Black Friday–Cyber Monday weekend, a 24% increase over 2023, with more than 76 million consumers buying from Shopify‑powered stores. ^[18]

Shopify’s own holiday guidance and third‑quarter results underscore how crucial this week is:

Q3 2025 revenue grew about 32% year‑over‑year to $2.84 billion, beating Wall Street expectations and continuing a streak of strong revenue and free cash flow growth. ^[19]
Gross merchandise volume for the quarter rose around 32% to roughly $92 billion, and Shopify projected mid‑to‑high‑twenties percent revenue growth for Q4, setting the stage for a huge holiday season. ^[20]

Against this backdrop, even a short‑lived outage on Cyber Monday has outsized significance — not only for individual merchants’ holiday performance, but also for investor confidence in Shopify’s infrastructure.

How much damage could this outage do?

Lost productivity vs. lost sales

Because Shopify’s checkout and storefront currently appear mostly operational, this incident is hitting merchants hardest behind the scenes:

Many can’t log into admin to change prices, launch or adjust Cyber Monday promotions, or pause campaigns if inventory runs low. ^[21]
Some report they can’t see new orders in the web admin, even though mobile notifications are still coming through — making fulfillment planning tricky. ^[22]
POS login issues and sporadic POS outages create friction for retailers with physical stores or pop‑ups that rely on Shopify hardware and software to transact. ^[23]

For many brands, the immediate cost is lost time and operational chaos rather than a complete stop in revenue. Staff are stuck refreshing dashboards, trying new devices or browsers, and scrambling in Slack channels rather than focusing on customer support and order fulfillment.

However, history shows that even partial performance problems during BFCM can meaningfully depress conversion and sales:

One analysis of holiday performance found that average Shopify store downtime during the Black Friday–Cyber Monday period rose nearly 20% in 2024, with checkout abandonment increasing around 12% and average load speeds slowing by more than half a second. ^[24]
Outage‑tracking firm Out Of The Blue documented multiple ecommerce infrastructure incidents over last year’s BFCM week — including issues at platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and PayPal — arguing that fragile digital supply chains are now one of the biggest hidden risks of Cyber Week. ^[25]

If today’s admin incident remains contained and storefront performance stays stable, the aggregate sales impact for Shopify merchants may be relatively modest compared with a full checkout outage. But for individual stores that rely heavily on real‑time merchandising, live inventory updates or manual order handling, a 30–90 minute lockout on Cyber Monday can easily translate into five‑ or six‑figure revenue swings.

A pattern of admin issues?

This isn’t the first time in recent quarters that Shopify’s admin has buckled under pressure:

Status‑tracker IsDown lists several admin‑related incidents in 2024 and 2025 — including merchants seeing blank admin pages, 500 errors, or being unable to log in at all — many of them categorized as “minor” but occurring during peak shopping periods. ^[26]
On November 18, 2025, a separate widespread Cloudflare outage briefly disrupted multiple Shopify services, leading to “internal service error” messages until Cloudflare rolled out a fix. ^[27]

None of these incidents were as high‑stakes as a Cyber Monday disruption, but together they reinforce ongoing merchant concerns about visibility into Shopify’s reliability and historical status data.

What Shopify is saying (and not saying) so far

Shopify has so far kept its official messaging fairly narrow:

The status page acknowledges login problems and degraded performance in Admin, API & Mobile, Support and POS, but continues to show Storefront and Checkout as operational. ^[28]
According to German coverage summarizing Shopify’s X posts, the company has told merchants it is aware of issues affecting some admins, is working on a fix, and recommends staying logged in where possible. ^[29]

As of the latest updates, Shopify has not publicly disclosed a root cause, exact scope, or estimated time to resolution. It also hasn’t yet posted a detailed incident report — something merchants increasingly expect, especially after high‑profile outages blamed on third‑party infrastructure providers.

Based on typical large‑scale SaaS incidents, plausible culprits include:

Authentication or session‑management bugs
Database or cache capacity issues under peak Cyber Monday load
Networking or CDN issues affecting specific regions

But at this stage, any specific diagnosis would be speculative. The only confirmed fact is that Shopify engineers are still actively investigating.

What merchants should do right now

If your Shopify store is affected by today’s outage, you have limited levers — but there are practical steps that can reduce damage and help you recover faster.

1. Confirm the scope of your specific issue

Before making drastic changes, check:

Shopify Status page to confirm current incident details and components impacted. ^[30]
Downdetector or similar services to see whether reports are localized or truly global. ^[31]

If storefront and checkout appear functional but admin is not, focus on keeping the customer‑facing side stable while you work around backend limitations.

2. Try alternative access paths (carefully)

Some merchants report better luck with:

The Shopify mobile admin app instead of desktop browsers
A different browser or device
Incognito / private windows, or clearing cache and cookies, as outlined in Shopify’s own login troubleshooting guides ^[32]

Important: avoid logging out on devices that are still connected to admin, in line with Shopify’s advisory to stay logged in if possible. ^[33]

3. Stabilize customer communication

If your storefront is having issues:

Add a simple banner or announcement bar explaining that you’re experiencing technical issues and that orders may take slightly longer to process.
Update FAQ, help pages, or social profiles with short status notes instead of replying one‑by‑one to worried customers.
For high‑value B2B buyers or VIPs, send a targeted email or SMS acknowledging the situation and reaffirming that orders will be honored as soon as systems are fully restored.

Even if customers never see the outage, proactive communication can build trust — a key factor in loyalty decisions, according to Shopify’s own holiday survey. ^[34]

4. Capture orders and issues offline where possible

If you can’t see orders in admin but know they’re being placed:

Export or screenshot order notifications from email or mobile so you have a temporary offline queue to reconcile later.
Keep a manual log (even a shared spreadsheet) of inbound customer requests, returns and order changes.
For physical locations, be prepared to switch to offline POS modes, keep paper receipts as backup, or temporarily route card payments through an alternate terminal if available.

You’ll need to reconcile all this data once admin is stable again, but this approach prevents “invisible” orders from slipping through the cracks during the outage window.

5. Pause risky changes and automations

During an incident:

Avoid making big theme or code changes.
Be cautious about running bulk edits on prices, collections or inventory via apps or custom scripts.
Temporarily suspend third‑party automations that depend heavily on real‑time Shopify API responses (for example, aggressive inventory syncing or dynamic discount engines).

Keeping your setup steady reduces the risk that the eventual fix conflicts with half‑executed changes.

Longer‑term lessons: resilience for the next BFCM

This Cyber Monday outage will eventually end; the structural question for Shopify merchants is how to mitigate this kind of risk next time.

Based on outage data and BFCM performance analyses, a few investment areas stand out: ^[35]

Redundant communication channels
- Collect customer emails, SMS opt‑ins and social followers before BFCM so you can redirect traffic and explain issues quickly if your primary storefront hiccups.
Monitoring and alerting
- Use third‑party uptime and performance tools (like the Uptime app and others in Shopify’s ecosystem) to monitor your store independently of Shopify’s official status page. ^[36]
Simplified, resilient checkout flows
- Minimize unnecessary scripts and apps on your checkout and key landing pages, especially during BFCM, to reduce the chance that a separate vendor’s issue compounds a platform‑level problem.
Operational runbooks for incidents
- Document who does what when “Shopify is down”: communication templates, manual order capture processes, alternative payment methods, and escalation contacts.
Multi‑channel strategy
- Ensure you’re not entirely dependent on a single storefront; marketplaces, social commerce and in‑person events can provide revenue ballast during platform incidents — something Shopify itself emphasizes in its omnichannel guidance. ^[37]

What to watch in the coming hours

As Cyber Monday 2025 continues, several storylines will determine how significant this outage ultimately becomes:

Duration and depth of the incident
Will admin access and POS be fully stable again before the evening peak in US and European time zones?
Impact on Cyber Monday sales records
Adobe still expects a record $14.2 billion in US Cyber Monday spend, fueled by AI‑assisted deal‑hunting and strong discounting. Whether Shopify merchants capture their expected share of that pie will depend on how quickly the platform returns to normal. ^[38]
Shopify’s incident report and future roadmap
Merchants will be watching for a transparent post‑mortem: what went wrong, how many stores and orders were affected, and what Shopify plans to change in its infrastructure, capacity planning and communication practices before BFCM 2026.
Investor reaction
With Shopify’s stock already sensitive to any signs that its high holiday expectations might be at risk, analysts will be parsing Black Friday and Cyber Monday GMV numbers together with today’s outage narrative. ^[39]

For now, the best move for merchants is to treat storefront availability as sacred, lean on any channels that are still working (especially mobile admin), keep customers in the loop, and document everything for later reconciliation. Cyber Monday is unforgiving — but a clear, calm operational response can keep a technical setback from becoming a brand crisis.