You scheduled a campaign for 10am. It's 10:47 and the sends are stuck at zero. No errors, no bounce notifications — just silence. You check Klaviyo's dashboard and see the familiar yellow banner: Degraded performance affecting email delivery.
Klaviyo outages are particularly painful because the damage is invisible. Unlike a payment failure, customers don't call you. Your emails just don't arrive. Flows don't trigger. Revenue quietly disappears.
Here's what to do when Klaviyo goes down — and how to catch it before it costs you.
Step 1: Confirm it's Klaviyo, not your account
First, rule out account-level issues. Check status.klaviyo.com. If you see an active incident, it's platform-wide — not something you did wrong.
Signs it's a Klaviyo outage rather than a configuration issue:
- Campaigns stuck in "Sending" with no deliveries
- Flows not triggering despite confirmed events
- API calls returning errors or timing out
- SMS sends queued but not delivering
Step 2: Pause any time-sensitive campaigns
If you have a campaign mid-send, pause it. Partial sends during an outage often result in duplicate deliveries once service restores — some subscribers get the email twice, some never. Pause, wait for full recovery, then resume.
Do not reschedule to a new time during an outage. Klaviyo may queue the send and fire it the moment service recovers, regardless of what time you set.
Step 3: Delay any flash sales or time-bound promotions
If you have a sale that started an hour ago and the announcement email hasn't gone out, extend the sale deadline. A "24-hour sale" where the email was delayed 3 hours should become a 27-hour sale. Update the landing page and any social posts to match.
Do not blast the email the moment Klaviyo recovers without adjusting your offer. Sending "Sale ends in 1 hour" at 4pm when it actually ends at midnight is the fastest way to lose subscriber trust.
Step 4: Check your abandoned cart and welcome flows
Klaviyo outages often delay — but don't permanently stop — triggered flows. However, abandoned cart emails that were supposed to fire 1 hour after abandonment may fire 4 hours later instead, when the cart is cold and the customer has moved on.
After the outage: check your flow activity feed and look for a backlog of queued sends. Decide if any delayed sends are now out of context and should be suppressed.
Step 5: Use Shopify's built-in email for critical communications if needed
If the outage lasts more than a few hours and you need to communicate with customers urgently — order updates, shipping delays, anything time-sensitive — Shopify Email is a viable fallback. It's basic, but it works independently of Klaviyo.
Step 6: Document the impact
When Klaviyo recovers, check your campaign and flow reports for the affected window. Note the revenue impact — this is useful for requesting credit from Klaviyo support, which they sometimes provide for platform-side outages.
The real cost: you found out too late
Most store owners find out about a Klaviyo outage when they manually check why a campaign didn't perform. By then it's been hours. The sale has ended. The cart is cold. The opportunity is gone.
StatusBird checks Klaviyo's status every two minutes and texts you the moment an incident is reported. You get a message that says: "Klaviyo is down — degraded performance detected. Pause scheduled campaigns. Check flow triggers. Delay any time-sensitive sends."
The faster you know, the more you can protect. Start monitoring Klaviyo free on StatusBird.
Klaviyo outage checklist
- Confirm on status.klaviyo.com
- Pause any mid-send campaigns
- Extend deadlines on time-bound promotions
- Check for delayed flow sends after recovery
- Use Shopify Email as a fallback if needed
- Document impact and contact Klaviyo support for credit