Shopify suffered a major Cyber Monday outage, locking merchants out during peak sales and sparking a 5% drop in its share price.
Background: Shopify is the Canadian e-commerce platform founded in 2006, which now powers over 1.7 million merchants globally.
What happened: This year, Shopify hit a major snag on Cyber Monday. At 11am New York time, over 4,000 users reported outages, preventing merchants from accessing admin dashboards, point-of-sale systems, and even checkouts.
What else: The issue has since been fixed, but the timing caused Shopify’s share price to drop 5% as investors questioned its reliability on one of the most important days of the year.
What's the key learning?
💡In e-commerce, reliability isn’t just a feature... it’s the whole product. Merchants depend on platforms like Shopify to run critical sales events without interruptions.
💡Even brief outages on peak days can have massive financial impacts. Last year, Shopify merchants processed $11.5 billion USD over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So even a few hours of downtime could cost hundreds of millions in lost sales.
💡And clearly the system failures don’t just affect merchants, they also hit Shopify's share price too.
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