Is Shopify really down, or is it just my store?
A step-by-step way to tell a real Shopify platform outage apart from a store-specific theme, app, or DNS problem, using Shopify's own status page as the source of truth.
What's going on
My store's checkout stopped working for about twenty minutes this afternoon and I panicked, posted in a Facebook group asking if anyone else's Shopify was down, and got a handful of replies saying "yeah mine too" and "mine's fine actually." I still don't know if it was a real Shopify outage or something wrong with my own store, and by the time I figured out where to check, it had already resolved itself. I don't want to waste another afternoon digging through app settings and DNS records if it turns out Shopify itself was just having a bad day.
This is a genuinely common moment of confusion for merchants: something breaks, the instinct is to ask other merchants on social media, but crowd-sourced reports on Facebook or Reddit are noisy and unreliable. Some replies describe an entirely different, unrelated problem on their own store. Meanwhile Shopify maintains an authoritative, real-time status page that most merchants simply don't know exists or don't check first.
Why it happens
Shopify runs on shared, multi-tenant infrastructure, so when a real incident happens (elevated error rates on checkout, API latency, admin login trouble) it can affect many stores at once and generate a burst of social media chatter faster than most merchants can find Shopify's own status page.
The confusion is compounded because store-specific problems, like an expired custom domain SSL certificate, a botched theme edit, a newly installed app throwing errors, or a DNS misconfiguration, produce symptoms that look identical to a platform outage from the merchant's seat: pages not loading, checkout erroring, admin unreachable. Without a definitive source of truth, it's easy to misattribute a local problem to "Shopify is down," or vice versa.
4 ways to fix it
Check status.shopify.com first, not your own theme or apps
Before touching anything in your admin, go to status.shopify.com. This is Shopify's official status page, and it reports real-time and historical incidents across areas like the storefront, checkout, and admin. If Shopify is having a real problem, it typically shows up there within minutes, along with a short description and updates until it's resolved. If nothing is listed, the problem is very likely specific to your store rather than a platform-wide outage, even if social media is full of "is Shopify down" chatter.
Subscribe to status updates so you're not guessing next time
Status pages like this one typically let you subscribe to updates by email or RSS so you're notified automatically when an incident opens or closes. That is far more reliable than watching X or Facebook groups, where reports are often anecdotal, delayed, or actually describe a completely different problem on someone else's store. Subscribing means you get an authoritative signal the moment something changes instead of waiting for someone else to post.
If the status page is clean, isolate the failure yourself
Work through causes roughly in order of likelihood: an unpaid bill or otherwise frozen store, a custom domain DNS or SSL issue, a theme you recently edited that's throwing an error, an app you just installed or updated, or simple browser caching. Try your store in a private/incognito window or on a different device or network to rule out local caching or DNS propagation delays on your end. If you recently published a theme change or installed an app, temporarily reverting it, by switching back to a previous theme version or disabling the app, is usually the fastest way to confirm whether that change caused the problem.
Contact Shopify Support to confirm, not just community posts
If the status page shows nothing but your store is still misbehaving, contact Shopify Support directly through your admin rather than relying on forum or Facebook threads. Support can look at logs specific to your shop that a public status page doesn't cover, and can tell you definitively whether an issue is on Shopify's side or your store's side.
Bottom line
Most "is Shopify down" scares turn out to be store-specific: a DNS record, an SSL certificate mid-renewal, a bad app update, or a theme edit that broke a template. Get in the habit of checking status.shopify.com, and subscribing to it, before assuming a platform-wide outage, then work through domain, theme, and app changes methodically if the status page is clean. This is a diagnostic workflow, not something a paid app fixes: BesPoP doesn't have a dedicated outage-detection tool, since Shopify's own status page already does that job.
Browse the rest of the problem library, run a free storefront scan to catch issues like this automatically, or email us and we'll work out a custom solution for it.