Shopify is reliable overall but not incident-free: StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 99.91% availability with 1 major incident totaling 1 hour 46 minutes of downtime in the last 90 days.
Numbers alone do not tell you whether to worry, so this post also covers what actually breaks when Shopify has problems and how to get warned early.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that runs the entire online store for millions of merchants: storefront, product catalog, cart, checkout, payments, order management, and admin. Merchants build their store on Shopify themes or headless setups and extend it with apps, while Shopify hosts the infrastructure. For most stores on it, Shopify is not one integration among many; it is the store itself.
Shopify uptime and outage history
| Metric (90 days, as of August 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Availability | 99.91% |
| Reliability grade | A |
| Major incidents | 1 |
| Total major-outage downtime | 1 hour 46 minutes |
| Average incident duration | 1 hour 46 minutes |
| Most recent major incident | August 20, 2026 |
| Checks in window | 61,593 |
Among the 7 e-commerce platform services StatusBird monitors, Shopify ranks number 6 for 90-day availability. See the full ranking of e-commerce platform tools by reliability.
What happens to your store when Shopify goes down?
A Shopify outage can take down your entire storefront, meaning shoppers cannot browse, add to cart, or check out at all, and every minute is directly lost revenue. Partial incidents are common too: checkout or Shopify Payments can fail while product pages still load, or the admin can go down so you cannot manage orders while the storefront works. Apps, POS, and the API can also be affected, breaking fulfillment tools and in-person sales that run through Shopify POS.
This pattern is not unique to any one vendor. The Uptime Institute's Annual Outage Analysis has found year after year that a growing share of serious outages originate with third-party and cloud providers rather than in-house systems, and that most significant outages now carry six-figure costs.
Typical symptoms during a Shopify outage:
- Storefront returning errors, timeouts, or blank pages
- Checkout failing or hanging after the shopper clicks pay
- Shopify admin unreachable while trying to manage orders
- Shopify POS unable to process in-person sales
- Apps and API integrations returning errors or timing out
If you are in the middle of an incident right now, see what to do when Shopify goes down for a step-by-step playbook.
Frequently asked questions
Is there anything I can do to bring my store back up during a Shopify outage?
No. Shopify is fully hosted, so there is no server you can restart or failover you can trigger. Your job during the outage is communication and damage control: confirm on status.shopify.com that it is platform-wide, tell customers you are aware, and be ready to reconcile orders once service returns.
Did I lose the orders customers tried to place while checkout was failing?
Checkouts that never completed are lost sales, though some appear as abandoned checkouts you can recover with an email once things are back. Payments that were captured mid-incident may show as orders with odd payment states, so audit orders from the incident window for duplicates or missing captures before fulfilling.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Shopify's status every 2 minutes, around the clock, independently of the vendor. The availability figure counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded so numbers are not skewed by vendors that report small blips near-continuously. Grades run from A+ to F. See the live numbers on the Shopify reliability page and current status on the Shopify status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Shopify and 83 other services online stores depend on, plus your own storefront, every 2 minutes. When something goes down you get an SMS, email, or Slack alert with plain-English context, usually before the official status page catches up. Start monitoring free, no card required for the free plan.