Is Shopify down? Cloudflare internal server error explained

Shopify has been down for the second time this month after the first outage was reported on Monday, December 1. The platform then stated that shortly before 10 am EST on Monday, many merchants reported issues accessing point-of-sale as well as admin systems. While the issues seemingly got resolved at the time, netizens have again flooded social media hinting at another outage.

X, formerly known as Twitter, has been filled with comments from users who have also shared screengrabs indicating that Shopify has been down. One user commented,

"All Shopify websites are down. Cloudfare is down. Turn off your ads." 

"And your site is down again today. Sort yourselves out!!" exclaimed a netizen.

"Fix your damn platform. The fact that its been down this long without any update or notice to the users is ridiculous," complained another X user.

According to a report by digit.in dated December 5, the main issue started after Cloudflare began facing an outage, thus affecting several other platforms. The report suggested that thousands of users reported facing issues with applications such as Canva, Fortnite, Crunchyroll, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Zoom, and Shopify.

According to digit.com, the latest update indicated that "scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary."

Shopify has issued a statement addressing the outage that users experienced on Monday

As previously mentioned, Shopify users have been facing issues operating the platform in the past few days. While a major outage happened on Monday, many users complained about facing problems today as well. Meanwhile, the application addressed the previous issue on Monday and issued a statement. They wrote on X,

"We're aware of an issue with Admins impacting selected stores and are working to resolve it. For the most up-to-date information, please refer to our status page at shopifystatus.com. Thank you for your patience."

A follow-up tweet by Shopify stated,

"We had a system degradation that has now been mitigated. We kept checkout and storefronts online, but access to admin interfaces was temporarily unavailable for some merchants. This briefly extended to POS but was quickly resolved."

According to Downdetector, over 4,000 users complained about facing issues while operating Shopify earlier this week. The second outage of the month has angered many netizens, out of whom a lot urged the application to fix the errors. A lot of memes and jokes regarding the situation have made it to the internet.

Many netizens joked that a rookie developer possibly selected the wrong option on their first day in the office and caused the massive outage. It must be noted that the jokes stemmed from rumors and could not be verified. No official statement from either Cloudflare or Shopify had suggested the reference of any developer intern.

For the unversed, Shopify uses Cloudflare's global network to speed up its own stores all across the world. Thus, if Cloudflare is down, there is a strong possibility that Shopify got affected as well. Major companies like IBM, Zoom, and Microsoft also use Cloudflare for performance and security.