Shopify suffered an outage on Sunday June 2, 2019. Shopify depends on Google’s cloud infrastructure, which went down on Sunday, presumably knocking down many Shopify shopping sites along with it.
Shopify Users Complained on Twitter
Shopify customers were understandably concerned. One online merchant asked on Twitter if he was going to be compensated for lost sales
Another Shopify customer tweeted:
“As store owners, we are rightfully entitled to some sort of monetary compensation or remuneration for this major outage. Losses in sales and ad spend today have
been (and are continually) adding up.. “
Shopify Tweeted their response:
“Hi, there. We aren’t able to offer compensation for downtime. I recognize this is frustrating and it is for us as well, but I assure you we have all hands on
deck to restore service as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.”
Shopify Outage Appears to be Due to Google Cloud
Shopify uses Google’s cloud infrastructure for it’s services. In March 2018 Shopify announced their partnership with Google Cloud.
Here is how Shopify explained their use of Google Cloud:
“After 12 years of building and running the foundation of our own commerce cloud with our own data centers, we are excited to build our Cloud with Google.
We are better positioned to change the face of global commerce while providing more opportunities to the 600,000+ merchants on our platform today.”
Unfortunately, Shopify’s dependence on Google Cloud may have been it’s weak spot. Google Cloud’s network outage may have resulted in thousands of businesses going down on Sunday June, 2nd, 2019.
Here is Shopify’s official status update:
The outage appears to be due to a Google Cloud outage that also affected YouTube and Snapchat.
In a series of announcements, the Google Cloud Service reported that they were experiencing network congestion.
Google then announced that the outage was resolved as of 4 PM Pacific time, which corresponds with 7 PM Eastern.
Shopify Outage Resolved
Shopify posted a status update notifying customers that the problem has been resolved:
“All systems are now fully operational. We recognize and apologize for the stress, concern and impact this outage had on your business. In the coming days we will be working to fully understand how this widespread Internet infrastructure failure affected our platform.”
Read Google’s full explanation of the cloud outage here.
Read the Shopify status page here.
