Shopify Outage Locks Merchants Out on Cyber Monday

What should have been a Cyber Monday victory lap for Shopify turned into a midday nightmare as merchants worldwide lost access to their admin dashboards and point‑of‑sale systems on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. Storefronts kept taking orders, but merchants said they were locked out of the tools they use to change prices, push promotions and manage orders in real time.

TechRadar reported that login problems began shortly after 9 a.m. ET, with outage reports on Downdetector climbing into the thousands as retailers tried and failed to reach their Shopify admin panels. Shopify’s public status page confirmed that some merchants were seeing errors when logging into Admin, POS, mobile and support, and urged anyone still logged in to stay that way while it worked on a fix. Checkout remained fully operational, limiting customer‑facing disruption but leaving merchants flying blind.

Shopify’s incident log shows the company began investigating a login issue affecting Admin and POS early Monday and spent several hours applying “mitigations” to its authentication flow before declaring the problem fixed and systems recovering later in the day. For many merchants, that translated into roughly four hours of degraded access during the heart of Cyber Monday trading. It was just enough, TechRadar noted, for some U.S. sellers to salvage the afternoon, but not enough for others in Europe and Latin America.

The timing is awkward. In its latest Black Friday‑Cyber Monday recap, Shopify said merchants on its platform generated a record $11.5 billion in gross merchandise volume over the long weekend, up 24% year over year, as more than 76 million consumers bought from Shopify‑powered brands. The company also spotlighted a 58% year‑over‑year increase in sales made via Shop Pay and characterized the weekend as a demonstration of its infrastructure’s reliability and scale.

PYMNTS’ recent reporting has tracked Shopify’s evolution into payments‑ and finance‑centric infrastructure, the expansion of embedded lending and working capital products that make the platform a funding lifeline for SMBs; its expanding pay‑later partnership with Affirm, operational partnerships such as Pipe17 aimed at simplifying order management; and new AI‑driven tools, including its Sidekick assistant and “commerce for agents” stack, meant to route more discovery and checkout volume through Shop Pay. Monday’s outage underscores that for merchants and their banking and payments partners, platform concentration risk and resiliency planning now sit alongside promotional strategy on the Cyber Monday checklist.