First, confirm it is actually Vercel and not your store. Then contain the damage and communicate. Here is exactly how to do that during a Vercel outage, plus what usually breaks and how long incidents tend to last.
How do I confirm Vercel is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Vercel status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Vercel's own status page at www.vercel-status.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 Vercel outage look like?
- Storefront returning 500-series errors, timeouts, or a blank page for all visitors
- Pages render but cart, search, or account features backed by serverless functions fail
- Deployments stuck in queue or failing in the Vercel dashboard
- Vercel dashboard itself slow or unreachable
- Sudden traffic and sales flatline in analytics
What breaks in your store
If your storefront is hosted on Vercel, a Vercel outage can take your entire site offline: customers get errors or timeouts on every page, which means zero traffic, zero conversions, and zero revenue until it recovers. Partial incidents can be subtler, with serverless or edge functions failing so pages load but cart actions, search, or API-backed features break. Deployments can also fail, blocking you from shipping fixes. Your commerce backend and its hosted checkout may remain healthy even while the Vercel-hosted frontend is dark.
For context, StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 1 major Vercel incident in the last 90 days, with an average duration of 1 hour 6 minutes. Details are on the Vercel reliability page.
What to do during the outage
- Point customers to your platform's hosted checkout or a backup domain if the backend is still up.
- Post on social channels and email lists that the site is temporarily down with a direct link that works.
- Avoid pushing new deployments mid-incident since builds may fail or behave unpredictably.
- If DNS is under your control and you maintain a static fallback page, switch traffic to it.
- Confirm the issue on the Vercel status page before rolling back your own recent deploys.
Frequently asked questions
My whole store is on Vercel and it is down. Is my data safe?
Yes. Vercel hosts your frontend code and functions, while your products, orders, and customers live in your commerce backend such as Shopify or your database. An availability incident does not delete anything; the store returns as soon as hosting recovers.
Can I move off Vercel quickly during an outage?
An emergency migration mid-outage is rarely practical because DNS changes, builds, and environment variables take time. The better play is a prepared fallback, such as a static maintenance page or your platform's hosted storefront, that you can switch on within minutes.
After the outage
Once Vercel 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 Vercel 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 Vercel'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 Vercel reliability page and current status on the Vercel status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Vercel 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.