When Northbeam goes down, do three things first: confirm the outage is on their side, protect whatever the outage is breaking in your store, and tell affected customers before they find out the hard way. This playbook walks through each step for Northbeam specifically.
How do I confirm Northbeam is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Northbeam status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Northbeam's own status page at www.northbeam.io/. 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 Northbeam outage look like?
- Northbeam dashboards fail to load or show a data freshness lag
- Attributed revenue drops sharply while platform and store revenue stay normal
- Blended ROAS or MER metrics disagree wildly with ad platform reporting
- Pixel events stop appearing for recent site sessions
- Data syncs from ad platforms show as delayed or failed
What breaks in your store
A Northbeam outage does not touch your storefront, checkout, or the ads themselves; sales and ad delivery continue normally. What breaks is visibility: dashboards stop loading or show stale data, and if the Northbeam pixel fails to collect events there can be a permanent gap in first-party attribution data for the outage window. The operational risk is media buyers making budget decisions on frozen or partial numbers, or pausing profitable campaigns because attributed revenue appears to have collapsed.
For context, Northbeam 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
- Confirm real revenue in Shopify or your commerce platform before reacting to any Northbeam number.
- Fall back to native ad platform reporting and store analytics for budget decisions during the outage.
- Freeze major budget reallocations until Northbeam confirms data has fully backfilled.
- Note the outage window so you can treat attribution data from that period as incomplete in later analysis.
- Contact Northbeam support to confirm whether pixel collection or only the dashboard was affected.
Frequently asked questions
Northbeam shows my revenue fell off a cliff today. Is my store actually down?
Check your store's own order dashboard first. If Shopify shows normal orders, the drop is a Northbeam data ingestion or dashboard issue, not a real sales problem. Attribution data usually backfills after the outage, though gaps in pixel collection can be permanent.
Should I pause ad spend while Northbeam is down?
No, not because of the outage alone. Your ads and store are functioning; you have only lost the attribution lens. Use in-platform reporting and blended store revenue as a temporary guide, and avoid big reallocation decisions until Northbeam's data catches up.
After the outage
Once Northbeam 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 Northbeam 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 Northbeam'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 Northbeam reliability page and current status on the Northbeam status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Northbeam 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.