When Shippo 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 Shippo specifically.
How do I confirm Shippo is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Shippo status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Shippo's own status page at status.goshippo.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 Shippo outage look like?
- Label purchases failing or timing out in the Shippo dashboard or API
- No shipping rates returned when quoting a shipment
- Live rates at checkout erroring or falling back to defaults if powered by Shippo
- Orders not importing from your store into Shippo
- Tracking webhooks and status updates going quiet
What breaks in your store
When Shippo is down, you cannot buy shipping labels through it, so order fulfillment halts at the labeling step even though picking and packing can continue. Rate quotes fail, which also breaks live shipping rates at checkout for stores that pull rates through Shippo's API. Tracking status updates and webhooks stop, so customers see stale tracking information. Your store keeps taking orders; you just cannot ship them through Shippo until it recovers.
For context, StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 3 major Shippo incidents in the last 90 days, with an average duration of 2 hours 57 minutes. Details are on the Shippo reliability page.
What to do during the outage
- Buy labels directly from carrier websites such as USPS Click-N-Ship, UPS.com, or FedEx Ship Manager for urgent orders.
- Switch checkout to flat-rate or table-based shipping if live rates through Shippo are failing.
- Keep picking and packing so orders are ready to label the moment Shippo recovers.
- Record tracking numbers from manually purchased labels and add them to orders by hand.
- Watch status.goshippo.com and retry failed label purchases after recovery instead of duplicating them blindly.
Frequently asked questions
I was charged for a label but never received it. What should I do?
During an outage, a label purchase can succeed on the carrier side but fail to return the label file. Do not immediately repurchase, or you may pay twice. After Shippo recovers, check the transaction history in your dashboard; the label will usually appear there, and if not, request a refund for the failed transaction.
Can I still ship orders while Shippo is down?
Yes. Shippo is a layer on top of the carriers, and the carriers themselves are still operating. Buy labels directly from carrier websites or retail counters for anything urgent, save the tracking numbers, and enter them into your store orders manually so customers still get shipment notifications.
After the outage
Once Shippo 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 Shippo 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 Shippo'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 Shippo reliability page and current status on the Shippo status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Shippo 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.