Is Shopify down or just your store? How to tell fast
Is Shopify down or just your store? How to tell fast
If you're asking "is Shopify down," start at status.shopify.com. It shows whether Shopify has reported a problem with checkout, the storefront, the admin, payments or another part of the platform. If everything there is green and your store is still broken, the fault is very likely in your own setup: a theme edit, an app, a script, a discount rule or a domain setting. Shopify-wide outages are rare and usually short. Problems on a single store happen much more often, and they last longer because nobody else is reporting them.
The rest of this guide covers how to confirm which situation you're in, what evidence to collect, and where a person still has to make the call.
Why "is Shopify down" is usually the wrong first question
When sales stop or a customer emails to say checkout won't load, most merchants assume the platform is the problem. That's understandable, but it often costs time. If you spend 40 minutes refreshing a status page while a broken cart drawer is losing orders, the outage was yours all along.
A better question is narrower: is this problem happening for everyone on Shopify, or only for my customers? Once you know the answer, you know what to do next. If it's platform-wide, you wait and communicate. If it's your store, you investigate and fix it.
A fast way to check if Shopify is down: the evidence table
Work through these checks in order. Each one has a trigger (when to run it), what the evidence tells you, and what it can't tell you.
Test | Trigger | Evidence it gives you | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
Check status.shopify.com | Any report of a store not loading, failed checkout or admin errors | Confirms an acknowledged platform incident and which components it affects | Incidents can take time to be posted, and a green status doesn't prove your store works |
Load your store in a private window on mobile data | The store looks broken to you or to a customer | Rules out your browser cache, extensions, logged-in sessions and office network | One device and one location is a small sample |
Load a different Shopify store you know | Your storefront won't load at all | If other stores fail too, a platform or network issue is more likely | Other stores may run on different infrastructure paths or features |
Run through checkout with a test product | Orders have dropped or customers report payment errors | Shows exactly where checkout fails: cart, shipping, payment or confirmation | A manual run catches the failure on that one path, not edge cases like other currencies or discount codes |
Review recent changes | Something broke and Shopify status is green | Theme publishes, app installs, app updates and code edits from the last 24 to 48 hours are the likeliest causes | Apps can update on their own without a visible change log in your admin |
Check status pages for your apps | Reviews, search, subscriptions, upsells or a payment provider are failing | Shows whether a third-party service is degraded | Many apps have no public status page, or update it late |
Open the browser console on the broken page | A button, drawer or widget doesn't respond | JavaScript errors often name the script or app file causing the problem | Needs some technical comfort to read, and errors can be noisy |
What the pattern usually tells you
If status.shopify.com shows an incident and other stores are failing too, it's a platform issue. If Shopify is green, other stores load fine and your checkout fails, it's your store. When only one feature breaks (search returns nothing, or the cart drawer won't open) while the rest of the site loads normally, an app or a theme change is almost always the cause.
When Shopify really is down: what to do
Platform incidents are out of your hands, but how you respond still matters.
Subscribe to updates on status.shopify.com so you don't have to keep refreshing it.
Pause paid campaigns if checkout is affected. Paying for clicks that can't convert wastes budget.
Post a short note on your social channels if customers are actively contacting you.
Don't make theme or app changes while the incident is open. You'll muddy the evidence and may create a second problem.
Once Shopify marks the incident resolved, test your own checkout. A platform recovery doesn't mean every store recovers cleanly.
That last step gets skipped all the time. Merchants see "resolved," relax, and find out two days later that a cached script or a dependent app never came back properly.
When it's just your store: narrowing down the cause
Most incidents fall into this category, and they are also the harder ones to spot. Shopify's status page won't say anything about them, and nobody else will be posting about them.
Start with what changed
Look at the last few days. Did someone publish a theme, edit a section, install an app or change a discount? If yes, that's your first suspect. If you can safely roll back the theme to the previous version, do it and test again.
Then check your app stack
Third-party apps run code inside your storefront and checkout experience. When one of them has an outage or ships a bad update, the symptom looks like "my store is down" even though Shopify itself is fine. We've written a longer guide on monitoring your app stack for degradation if this is a recurring problem for you.
Test the journeys, not just the homepage
A homepage that loads tells you very little. Customers buy through search, collection filters, product pages, cart edits and checkout. Any one of those can fail while the homepage looks perfect. This is the difference between basic uptime checks and storefront journey monitoring. The first tells you whether the site responds, and the second tells you whether people can actually buy.
How continuous monitoring answers the question for you
The manual checklist works, but it has one big flaw: it starts after someone has already noticed the problem. Often that someone is a customer, or worse, a revenue report the next morning.
Shoptest is built to answer "is it Shopify or is it us?" before you have to ask. It combines two kinds of evidence.
Shopify and app monitoring tracks Shopify itself plus selected third-party services that storefronts depend on, so you can see a platform or vendor incident next to your own results.
Automated test flows simulate real shopper journeys on your store, including checkout, search, cart editing, mobile navigation, collection filters and quick add to cart, and flag failures when they happen.
Put those side by side and the diagnosis usually becomes obvious. Shopify healthy and your checkout test failing points at your store. Shopify degraded and every flow failing points at the platform. One flow failing while a monitored app shows problems points at that app.
When a test fails, Shoptest's AI-assisted diagnosis explains what broke and suggests how to fix it, which saves a lot of guessing during an incident. For a closer look at that process, see our practical guide to investigating store failures faster with AI.
Where human review still matters
Monitoring and AI diagnosis shorten the path to an answer. They don't replace judgment, and you shouldn't treat them as if they do.
A person still needs to decide whether to roll back a theme during a sale, whether to pause ads, and how to talk to customers. A person also needs to confirm the fix. If an AutoFix workflow updates a test and the test passes again, someone should check that the store really works and that the test wasn't simply adjusted to fit a broken page. And some failures come from business decisions like a changed shipping rule or an expired discount, which only someone who knows the store will spot.
The right split is to let automation spot the problem and gather the evidence, then have someone on your team decide what happens next.
Set up alerts before the next incident
Your next "is Shopify down?" moment is coming, whether it turns out to be the platform or a bad app update. The merchants who handle it well already have an answer in hand when it starts: which journeys are failing, since when, and whether Shopify reports a problem. If you want that kind of early warning, read our guide on getting alerted before customers notice.
A practical next step is to bookmark status.shopify.com, write down the apps your checkout depends on, and then run a free scan of your store with Shoptest to see what's already broken and which journeys are worth monitoring continuously.
