Shopify experienced an outage on Sunday, June 2, 2019. The platform relies on Google’s cloud infrastructure, which went down on that day, likely disrupting numerous Shopify shopping sites as well.
### Shopify Users Complained on Twitter
Shopify customers were understandably concerned. One online merchant took to Twitter to question if compensation would be provided for lost sales due to the outage.
Another Shopify customer tweeted:
>”As store owners, we are rightfully entitled to some sort of monetary compensation or remuneration for this major outage. Losses in sales and ad spend today have been (and are continually) adding up…”
Shopify responded on Twitter:
>”Hi, there. We aren’t able to offer compensation for downtime. I recognize this is frustrating and it is for us as well, but I assure you we have all hands on deck to restore service as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.”
### Shopify Outage Tied to Google Cloud
Shopify utilizes Google’s cloud infrastructure for its services. In March 2018, Shopify announced their partnership with Google Cloud. Here is how Shopify explained their use of Google Cloud:
>”After 12 years of building and running the foundation of our own commerce cloud with our own data centers, we are excited to build our Cloud with Google. We are better positioned to change the face of global commerce while providing more opportunities to the 600,000+ merchants on our platform today.”
Unfortunately, Shopify’s reliance on Google Cloud appeared to be a vulnerability. The Google Cloud network outage may have caused thousands of businesses to go offline on Sunday, June 2, 2019. The outage seems to be due to Google Cloud issues that also affected YouTube and Snapchat. Google Cloud Service reported experiencing network congestion.
Google later announced that the outage was resolved by 4 PM Pacific time, corresponding with 7 PM Eastern.
### Shopify Outage Resolved
Shopify posted a status update informing customers that the issue had been resolved:
>”All systems are now fully operational. We recognize and apologize for the stress, concern and impact this outage had on your business. In the coming days, we will be working to fully understand how this widespread Internet infrastructure failure affected our platform.”
Read Google’s full explanation of the cloud outage and visit the Shopify status page for more updates.
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