Shopify, which powers a whole load of online stores, is suffering an outage at the moment, preventing shoppers from using affected merchants.
The biz's status page right now acknowledges: "Some merchants and customers are experiencing issues accessing the storefront."
We're told the downtime started around 1252 PT (2052 UTC). Shopify has given folks some hope, noting on its status page: "We’ve identified the problem with merchants' storefronts showing an error and we’re working on a solution."
Over on Twitter, it added: "We are aware that some merchant storefronts are not loading at this time. Our developers are working to resolve this ASAP. Apologies for any inconvenience."
And over on Downdetector, you can see the extent of the IT breakdown: thousands of complaints in the past few minutes.
While some say the service is returning to normal, others are upset at lost sales and the inconvience.
"Front end completely down," wrote one merchant going by the name Jenna. "I had a huge collection launching at 4PM EST and it stopped working RIGHT before the launch."
Another chimed in: "It crashed 15 minutes AFTER my product launch today."
Another, called Rich, fumed:
Shopify always does this right at the holiday time (USA) they tinker with new features and updates and then FUBAR the site. I have a checkout every 7 minutes from a "New" visitor, so this lost revue and a lost customer that I will never get back. Admin going down I can live with but when they don't have a triple redundancy on a store front, it is inexcusable!
Shopify - SAVE YOUR UPDATES AND CHANGES FOR AFTER THE HOLIDAYS! Make your platform bulletproof and reliable, and have backup redundancies!
More to follow
Source: The register