Klaviyo is the engine behind most Shopify store email revenue — abandoned cart flows, welcome sequences, post-purchase follow-ups, and win-back campaigns. When it goes down, those flows stop silently. No error message appears in your Shopify admin. Orders keep coming in. You just stop following up on them.
Here is what to do the moment Klaviyo has an outage.
Step 1: Confirm it's Klaviyo, not your account
Check status.klaviyo.com. Klaviyo has a detailed public status page that breaks down issues by component: API, email sending, flows, segments, and analytics. Identify which component is affected before doing anything else.
Common signs of a Klaviyo outage:
- Flows are triggering in your dashboard but emails aren't being delivered
- New subscriber confirmations not arriving
- Abandoned cart emails missing in customers' inboxes
- Klaviyo API returning errors in your Shopify logs
Step 2: Check which flows are affected
Not all Klaviyo incidents affect all functionality. An API degradation might affect real-time flow triggers without affecting scheduled campaigns. Log in to Klaviyo and look at your flow analytics to see where volume has dropped.
Priority order of flows by revenue impact:
- Abandoned checkout (most urgent — directly recovers lost revenue)
- Post-purchase email (affects repeat purchase likelihood)
- Welcome sequence (affects subscriber activation)
- Browse abandonment (lower urgency)
Step 3: Don't pause your flows — they'll catch up
One of the most common mistakes during a Klaviyo outage is pausing flows to "prevent duplicate sends" when the platform recovers. Unless Klaviyo's status page explicitly says there will be double-sends on recovery, do not pause. Most Klaviyo outages result in delayed emails, not doubled ones. Pausing your flows means those customers never get the email at all.
Step 4: Check if transactional emails are affected
If you use Klaviyo for order confirmation and shipping notification emails, check whether those are also impacted. If they are, customers may call their bank or open disputes thinking their order didn't go through. Consider sending a manual Shopify notification or logging into Shopify and manually re-triggering order confirmations for orders placed during the outage window.
Step 5: Document the window for post-recovery analysis
Note the exact start and end time of the outage. After Klaviyo recovers, audit which flow events were queued and which were dropped. Some Klaviyo incidents result in the platform re-sending queued emails once restored; others silently drop them. Knowing which subscribers were affected lets you target them with a manual campaign.
How to get alerted the moment Klaviyo goes down
Klaviyo doesn't text you when it's having problems. You find out from customers, from missing revenue, or from manually checking the status page.
StatusBird monitors Klaviyo's status every 2 minutes and sends you an SMS within moments of any degradation — API issues, sending delays, or full outages. Monitor Klaviyo alongside Stripe, Shopify, and your shipping provider all in one dashboard. Start free, no credit card required.