Shopify, a major Canadian e-commerce platform, suffered a widespread outage on Cyber Monday 2025, which prevented thousands of merchants from managing transactions during one of the busiest shopping days.
The disruption was caused by a fault in Shopify’s login authentication system, affecting access to accounts and critical point-of-sale (POS) systems.
Although services began to recover by mid-afternoon after Shopify fixed the issue, some merchants continued to experience problems.
“We have found and fixed an issue with our login authentication flow, and are seeing signs of recovery for admin and POS login issues now,” the company stated.
This outage coincided with a peak retail period, with Adobe Analytics predicting U.S. online sales of about $14.2 billion on Cyber Monday, a 6.3% rise from the previous year.
Shopify processes over 10% of U.S. e-commerce transactions and supports merchants ranging from small businesses to large firms like Reebok and Mattel. Despite Black Friday figures showing a 25% year-on-year rise in gross merchandise volume to $6.2 billion, Shopify’s share price fell 5.8% following the outage.
The incident showed the critical reliance on digital infrastructure in global retail and the financial risks when such platforms experience disruptions, especially during key sales periods.
Approximately 4,000 reports of outage problems were logged at the peak. Shopify pledged to investigate the root causes to avoid similar disruptions in the future.