Shopify is experiencing a significant outage, with retailers reporting widespread problems across the platform.

The ecommerce giant—used by hundreds of Australian brands and more than two million businesses globally—ran into technical trouble late on Cyber Monday, one of the biggest online shopping days of the year. Thousands of merchants began reporting issues logging into their accounts, and Shopify later confirmed on both its status page and X account that it was dealing with a known system error.

According to Shopify’s support team, many merchants were unable to access their Shopify Admin dashboards. Others reported outages affecting checkout systems, back-end tools, and core commerce functions. Shopify’s point-of-sale (POS) network, APIs, mobile apps, and customer support channels also experienced “degraded performance.”

“We are continuing to investigate and apply mitigations for the issues with accessing Admins and POS systems,” Shopify said in an update. “Some merchants may also see an issue with POS checkouts, due to not being able to access POS systems.”Shopify (Image: Sourced from Unsplash)

Early this morning, the company said it had “found and fixed an issue with our login authentication flow,” and that it was beginning to see recovery across Admin and POS systems. “We are continuing to monitor recovery,” the update read. Merchants may see services gradually return to normal, which Shopify hopes will minimise disruption to ongoing holiday shopping.

How big is Shopify’s retail footprint?

Shopify highlighted just last week that it now powers 12 percent of all ecommerce in the United States, a figure that places it behind only Amazon. Globally, Shopify supports millions of merchants across 175 countries, ranging from small independent sellers to major international brands including Netflix, Mattel, and Converse.

But Shopify is no longer just an online-commerce engine. The company has rapidly expanded into physical retail, and its Shopify POS system now operates in more than 175 countries, supporting an estimated 100,000+ brick-and-mortar retailers worldwide. This means that outages don’t just affect online stores—they can also halt in-store checkout, inventory updates, and staff operations.

Global impact

ChannelNews understands that retailers around the world were hit by the issue, with both ecommerce and physical retail operations disrupted during a critical sales period.

When approached for further comment, Shopify directed media to its system status page and a post stating: “We’re aware of an issue with Admins impacting selected stores, and are working to resolve it.”