Our mission is to make commerce better for everyone by providing a reliable platform for you and your customers. Last Sunday we fell short of that goal as we experienced a full platform outage. We apologize for the impact that this outage had on your business. Your trust in us to run your business is something that we take very seriously. What follows is a description of what happened.
On June 2nd, 2019 between 18:48 UTC and 21:58 UTC Shopify was down for all merchants due to an outage in Google Cloud’s global network fabric. This caused an outage for all merchants and customers when browsing, checking out, or managing their stores. At 21:58 UTC, Shopify was operating at 55% availability, gradually recovering until 23:00 UTC when Shopify returned to full, normal operations.
Shopify runs across multiple regions and geographies. Running in multiple regions shields the Shopify platform from events such as large technical failures and natural disasters as each region is isolated from the others with the exception of some shared components, which includes part of the networking fabric.
A store is served out of one region at a time and we have developed advanced tools that move stores between regions in the face of an outage. We can move shops without any downtime. This allows for quick recovery for single region outages. While regional outages are infrequent, they do happen and we continuously invest in our platform to protect against them. For example, we routinely isolate regions in the anticipation of hurricanes that may impact a region.
Our multi-region architecture is built on the industry standard assumption that outages spanning multiple regions are extremely unlikely, and on June 2nd, for the first time in Shopify's history, we saw a multi-region outage of this nature. During the recovery not all regions came back at the same time. We quickly took advantage of our multi-region architecture and began moving stores to healthy regions to get merchants online as quickly as possible.
As uncommon as they are, a core, continental Internet infrastructure outage is a risk for all SaaS providers. Despite this multi-region outage, our architecture continues to be a resilient foundation for Shopify. We remain confident in our partnership with Google Cloud and that they will improve their infrastructure as a result of this outage. Follow their investigation here. Over the coming years we plan to expand into more regions worldwide to increase resiliency and support our merchants’ global expansion.
Jean-Michel Lemieux
CTO