When Squarespace 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 Squarespace specifically.
How do I confirm Squarespace is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Squarespace status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Squarespace's own status page at status.squarespace.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 Squarespace outage look like?
- Website unreachable, timing out, or showing a Squarespace error page
- Checkout or cart failing while regular pages still load
- Unable to log in to the Squarespace admin to manage orders or edit content
- Order confirmation emails not sending
- Domain or DNS issues if the domain is managed through Squarespace
What breaks in your store
When Squarespace has an outage, your whole website can go down, so shoppers see errors or endless loading instead of your store, and no browsing or purchasing happens at all. Partial incidents can break commerce features specifically, such as checkout failing while content pages still render, or lock you out of the admin so you cannot edit the site or manage orders. Squarespace-managed domains and email campaigns can also be affected in broader incidents.
For context, StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 2 major Squarespace incidents in the last 90 days, with an average duration of 12 hours 54 minutes. Details are on the Squarespace reliability page.
What to do during the outage
- Check status.squarespace.com to confirm the outage is on their side before touching your own settings.
- Announce the disruption on social media and email so customers know to come back rather than assuming you closed.
- Take urgent orders manually via DM, phone, or email and collect payment with a standalone link such as PayPal or Stripe.
- Avoid making DNS or domain changes during the outage since you cannot verify their effect and may compound the problem.
- After recovery, check the outage window for half-completed orders or payments that captured without creating an order.
Frequently asked questions
My Squarespace site is down. Can I restore it from a backup on another host?
Not practically during an outage. Squarespace is fully hosted with no export path that can be redeployed quickly elsewhere, so there is no self-service failover. The realistic response is confirming the outage on their status page, communicating with customers on channels you control, and waiting for Squarespace to resolve it.
Will my product and order data still be there when Squarespace comes back?
Yes. An availability outage means the servers are unreachable, not that your data is erased, and stores come back with catalog and order history intact. The gap to audit is the outage window itself: orders attempted then may be missing or incomplete, so reconcile payment processor records against Squarespace orders.
After the outage
Once Squarespace 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 Squarespace 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 Squarespace'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 Squarespace reliability page and current status on the Squarespace status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Squarespace 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.