Shopify suffered a major, globally felt outage yesterday on Cyber Monday - one of the single worst moments imaginable for an e-commerce platform used by millions of merchants. Beginning around 9:08 a.m. ET, store owners reported being unable to log into their dashboards, manage orders, update pricing, or access Point of Sale systems. The outage crippled merchants’ ability to run promotions, adjust Cyber Monday pricing, or handle backend operations during one of the highest-traffic days of the year. Reports surged on Downdetector in both the US and UK, peaking at several thousand, while Shopify acknowledged “degraded performance” on its platform (which is hosted on Google Cloud - GCP) and continued to investigate throughout the four-hour disruption.

The timing amplified the business impact of the outage, especially for small merchants who rely heavily on Cyber Monday revenue and had spent weeks preparing promotions they suddenly couldn’t activate. For many, it took several hours to regain access. With 2025 already marked by several large-scale outages across major tech platforms, this incident contributes to a growing pattern of service fragility during critical periods.

Events like this underscore the urgent need for organizations to modernize and unify their approach to Network Performance Monitoring (NPM), Application Performance Monitoring (APM), network forensics, observability, and availability monitoring with a platform like NIKSUN. Traditional siloed tools cannot provide the holistic, real-time visibility required to detect early degradations, trace root causes across distributed cloud environments, or prevent cascading failures. By integrating telemetry across networks, applications, cloud services, databases, user experience monitoring, and synthetic transactions - into a single correlated observability fabric - organizations can detect anomalies sooner, understand performance bottlenecks faster, and respond before customers or revenue are impacted. A revolutionary, end-to-end observability strategy is no longer optional; it is essential for maintaining uptime, preserving trust, and ensuring business resilience during the moments when it matters most.