A BigCommerce outage is not something you can fix, but how you respond in the first 15 minutes decides how much it costs you. This guide covers confirming the outage, limiting the damage, and keeping customers informed.
How do I confirm BigCommerce is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live BigCommerce status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, BigCommerce's own status page at status.bigcommerce.com. If the official page still shows green, do not assume you are wrong: vendors often acknowledge incidents well after they start. If both look clean, the problem is more likely your store's configuration or a specific integration.
What does a BigCommerce outage look like?
- Storefront pages returning errors, blank pages, or timing out
- Customers unable to add to cart or complete checkout
- Control panel login failing or admin pages erroring
- Connected apps reporting BigCommerce API errors or failed syncs
- Orders and traffic flatlining in analytics
What breaks in your store
A BigCommerce outage is as close to a total store outage as it gets: depending on the incident, storefronts fail to load, carts and checkout error out, or the control panel becomes unavailable so you cannot manage orders. If checkout is affected, revenue stops entirely for the duration. API incidents break headless storefronts and connected apps like fulfillment or ERP syncs even when the hosted storefront looks fine. Partial incidents are common, for example admin down while storefronts keep selling.
For context, BigCommerce has had no major incidents in the last 90 days of StatusBird's independent monitoring (100.0% availability), so a real outage is unusual. That makes it easy to mistake one for a problem on your end, which is why confirming first matters.
What to do during the outage
- Check status.bigcommerce.com to see whether storefront, checkout, control panel, or APIs are affected.
- Announce the disruption on social media and email so customers know to come back, since you cannot edit the site itself.
- Pause paid ad campaigns driving traffic to a dead storefront to stop wasting spend.
- Keep selling through unaffected channels such as marketplaces or social checkout if you have them.
- After recovery, verify recent orders, inventory levels, and app syncs, and consider a we-are-back email with a small incentive.
Frequently asked questions
Is there anything I can do to bring my store back up during a BigCommerce outage?
No, because BigCommerce hosts everything, recovery is entirely in their hands. Your job during the incident is damage control: pause ad spend, communicate with customers on channels you still control, and keep an eye on the status page for updates.
Did I lose orders that customers tried to place during the outage?
Orders that failed at checkout were never created, so those sales are lost unless the customer returns; orders completed before the incident are safe in the platform. After recovery, check for any orders stuck in odd states around the outage boundary and confirm payments matched.
After the outage
Once BigCommerce recovers, verify the affected workflows end to end rather than trusting the status page. Note the start and end times while they are fresh: if you are on a paid BigCommerce plan with an SLA, documented downtime is what a service credit claim is built on. See how to claim SLA credits for the process.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks BigCommerce'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 BigCommerce reliability page and current status on the BigCommerce status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors BigCommerce 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.