Is Shopify down, or is it just your store?

"Is Shopify down?" is the first thing every merchant types when sales flatline. It's the right instinct — but it answers only half the question. Platform outages are rare and fix themselves. Store-side outages are far more common, don't fix themselves, and look identical from where you're standing. Here's how to tell them apart fast, and what to do in each case.

How do I tell in 60 seconds?

1. Check the source of truth. Open shopifystatus.com. It reports live health for storefronts, checkout, admin and APIs. An active incident on "Storefronts" or "Checkout" means it's Shopify.
2. Cross-check user reports. Downdetector's Shopify page spikes within minutes of a real platform outage. A flat line there plus a green status page means the platform is fine.
3. Load your store from outside your own network. Open it on your phone with Wi-Fi off, in a private window. Your office network, VPN or browser cache can lie to you in both directions.
4. Load your .myshopify.com address. If your-store.myshopify.com loads but your custom domain doesn't, you've just diagnosed it: the problem is your domain or DNS — not Shopify, and not your theme.

The two-URL test settles most "is Shopify down?" panics in seconds: if your-store.myshopify.com loads but your custom domain doesn't, the problem is your domain or DNS — not Shopify, and not your theme.¶

If it is Shopify, what should I do (and not do)?

Genuine platform outages are rare, loud and short — and there is nothing on your store you can do to fix one. The discipline is in not acting:

• Don't change your theme, apps or DNS. Panic changes made during an outage are the classic way to be broken after Shopify recovers — and then spend a day hunting a problem you created.
• Subscribe to updates on the status page so you know the minute it's resolved.
• Pause paid ads if the outage runs long. Every click to a dead storefront is money burned. Our downtime cost calculator shows what an hour costs your store, with the method printed.
• Post a one-line notice to your social channels or email list if you're mid-promotion — it turns a bad experience into a human one.

If it is just your store, what are the usual suspects?

Status page green, store dead. Work this list top to bottom — it's ordered by how often each one is the cause:

1. Domain expired or DNS changed. The number-one cause of a fully offline store. Check your registrar for expiry and auto-renew, and confirm the records Shopify requires for a third-party domain: an A record pointing to 23.227.38.65 and a www CNAME to shops.myshopify.com (Shopify Help Center: Domains). The giveaway: .myshopify.com works, your domain doesn't.
2. SSL certificate error. Browsers show a security warning instead of your store. This usually follows a DNS change and resolves once the records are correct; Shopify's domain documentation gives the certificate up to 48 hours to issue after a change.
3. A broken theme deploy. A theme edit or update with a Liquid error can blank pages or kill the buy path while the rest of the site "loads". If it started right after a change, publish your pre-change theme copy. We covered the checkout version in did a theme update break your checkout?
4. A third-party app outage. If a page-builder, review or personalisation app's servers go down and your theme loads their script synchronously, your pages can hang or render broken. Check the vendor's own status page; disabling the app embed (Online Store → Themes → Customize → App embeds) confirms the diagnosis.
5. The store is paused or frozen. A failed subscription payment freezes the store until billing is fixed — visitors see an unavailable page. Check Settings → Plan and your billing email.

What if it is down for some customers only?

The outages above are at least honest — the store is down, you notice, you fix it. The expensive ones are partial: the store works on your laptop and fails on mobile Safari; works in one country and fails in another mid-DNS-propagation; every page loads except the two your ads point at. Your own visit looks fine, the dashboard looks plausible, and the failure runs for days.

That class of problem isn't caught by a status page or a quick look at the site. It's caught by visiting the real customer path, on a real device profile, on a schedule — which is the job of a monitor rather than a merchant.

During a genuine Shopify platform incident the correct move is to change nothing — mid-outage theme or app "fixes" are how a one-hour platform problem becomes a three-day self-inflicted one.¶

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading: Why did my sales suddenly drop? · Checkout is blank or white? · Did a theme update break my checkout? · What does an hour of downtime cost?