When checkout breaks, every minute is lost revenue, so here is the short answer first: it is usually not Shopify itself. Over the 180 days ending July 2026, StatusBird recorded zero major or critical Shopify platform incidents across nearly 5 million status checks. Shopify did have brief degradations in that window (the June 3 and June 24 events are covered in how often does Shopify go down), but the majority of broken checkouts trace to something attached to your store: the payment provider, an app, a theme edit, or a third-party service in the checkout path.
Work through these checks in order. Most stores find the culprit inside 5 minutes.
Is it Shopify or is it just your store?
Check Shopify's live status first. If Shopify is reporting a checkout or storefront incident, stop debugging: nothing on your side is broken, and the playbook in what to do when Shopify goes down takes over. One caution: official status pages often acknowledge problems 30 to 120 minutes after customers first feel them, so a green status page does not fully clear the platform. Independent monitoring closes that gap.
Is your payment provider down?
A checkout that loads but fails at payment is usually a payment problem, not a Shopify problem. Payment processors have real outages: in StatusBird's current 180-day window, Square logged a single incident lasting over 17 hours while Stripe and PayPal ran clean. If you use Shopify Payments, remember it runs on Stripe infrastructure; the differences are covered in Shopify Payments vs Stripe outages. Test with a second payment method (PayPal, Shop Pay, a manual method): if one method works and another fails, you have found your outage.
Did a recently installed app break checkout?
Apps that touch checkout, discounts, shipping rates, or post-purchase upsells can break the flow when they misbehave or when their backend goes down. If checkout broke shortly after you installed or updated an app, disable that app first. If you run checkout-critical apps (subscriptions, bundles, shipping calculators), their uptime is effectively your uptime: a Recharge or Bold outage is a checkout outage for the stores that depend on them.
Is it your theme or a recent edit?
A broken cart button, a JavaScript error from an edited template, or a half-published theme update can all present as "checkout not working." Preview your previous theme version: if checkout works there, the problem is in your latest theme change, not in any service.
Is it failing for everyone or just one customer?
One customer's declined card, VPN, ad blocker, or unsupported region is not an outage. Before escalating, reproduce the failure yourself in an incognito window and from a phone on cellular data. If you cannot reproduce it, ask the customer for the exact error text and try their payment method specifically.
How do I find out in minutes instead of hours next time?
The stores that lose the least revenue to broken checkouts are the ones that hear about the outage before customer emails arrive. StatusBird watches Shopify, Stripe, PayPal, and 80+ other services your checkout depends on, every 2 minutes, and alerts you by SMS, email, or Slack the moment one degrades, typically well before official status pages catch up.
Start monitoring your stack free with StatusBird: 3 services, no credit card required. Pro is $29/month for all 84 services with SMS, email, Slack, Teams, and Discord alerts within 2 minutes of a status change.