A WooCommerce outage is not something you can fix, but how you respond in the first 15 minutes decides how much it costs you. This guide covers confirming the outage, limiting the damage, and keeping customers informed.
How do I confirm WooCommerce is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live WooCommerce status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, WooCommerce's own status page at woo.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 WooCommerce outage look like?
- WooPayments checkout failing or payment authorization errors while the site otherwise works
- WooCommerce Shipping label purchases failing in the order screen
- Extension update checks or license activations erroring in wp-admin
- WooCommerce.com marketplace, docs, or account pages not loading
- Connected services like Woo tax rates returning errors
What breaks in your store
Because a WooCommerce store runs on your own hosting, an outage of WooCommerce.com itself does not take your storefront down. What breaks are the connected services: WooPayments transactions can fail at checkout, extension license checks and updates stop working, WooCommerce Shipping label purchases fail, and marketplace downloads or docs become unavailable. If checkout depends on WooPayments and it is affected, customers cannot pay even though the rest of the site works. Storefront downtime, by contrast, usually traces to your own host, not WooCommerce.
For context, WooCommerce 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
- Enable a second payment gateway such as PayPal or Stripe so checkout is not dependent on WooPayments alone.
- Buy shipping labels directly from carrier websites or another label tool until Woo Shipping recovers.
- Postpone plugin and extension updates until license servers respond again.
- Check your own hosting first: if the whole storefront is down, the cause is usually your server, not WooCommerce.
- Keep a local copy of critical extension zip files so reinstalls never depend on marketplace availability.
Frequently asked questions
WooCommerce.com is down. Why is my store still working?
Your store runs on your own web host, and the WooCommerce plugin executes there independently. WooCommerce.com is the company's website and services hub, so its outages mainly affect WooPayments, extension updates, licensing, and support resources rather than your storefront.
Customers cannot pay at checkout. Is that WooCommerce or my site?
If you use WooPayments, a service-side incident can block payment processing while everything else looks fine, so check the Woo status channels. If you use another gateway, check that gateway's status page and your own server logs. Enabling a backup gateway is the fastest way to restore sales either way.
After the outage
Once WooCommerce 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 WooCommerce 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 WooCommerce'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 WooCommerce reliability page and current status on the WooCommerce status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors WooCommerce 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.