Follow our proven framework to assess the outage, notify your team, protect your customer relationships, and bounce back stronger.
A website outage is every eCommerce team’s worst-case scenario—and when it happens, it rarely gives you time to prepare. Whether you’re running Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, or a custom build, the clock starts ticking the moment your site goes offline. Lost revenue. Wasted ad spend. Frustrated customers.
In this guide, you’ll find a clear, actionable process to follow immediately after an outage starts. From diagnosis to communication to full recovery, this is the plan we use ourselves and with our clients to minimize impact and move fast.
If you’re already in the middle of an outage, skip ahead and download the emergency checklist now.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to quickly diagnose what’s really going on (platforms, hosts, CDNs, third-party tools)
- What to do internally and externally to stop the bleeding and communicate clearly
- How to monitor and document the impact for your post-mortem and SLA claims
- Smart ways to recover with momentum—including how to turn chaos into customer loyalty
Before you can fix anything, you need to understand the scope. Is your entire platform down? Just your site? Or is it a third-party service causing the issue?
Start with the basics. Search your platform’s name plus “status page” on Google.
If your platform is down, you’re not alone—and support teams are already working on it.
Head to DownDetector.com and check both your platform and your own domain. If you see reports of outages across multiple platforms (Amazon, Google, Meta), you could be dealing with a global CDN or DNS issue.
That said, DownDetector often misses partial outages—where your homepage loads, but your checkout or images don’t. Keep digging.
Don’t assume it’s a global outage just because you can’t load your site.
If others can access it and you can’t, the issue could be localized to your ISP or DNS routing. Still serious—but a different fix.
If you’re using Cloudflare, Fastly, AWS, GCP, or Azure, check their status pages too. An upstream problem may be breaking your site even if your platform is technically “up.”
Once you’ve confirmed a real outage, it’s time to shift gears from diagnosis to control. What you say—and how fast you say it—can make or break customer trust.
Before you say anything publicly, stop the bleeding. Pause:
Sending paid traffic to a broken site is one of the fastest ways to lose both money and credibility.
Loop in:
Give them a short briefing and estimated timeline for updates. If you don’t have answers yet, say that—but commit to regular updates.
Use your most active channels:
X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Facebook, email—whatever your audience checks.
A simple message like this goes a long way:
“We’re experiencing a temporary website issue and are actively working on it. Thanks for your patience—we’ll keep you updated here.”
Avoid overpromising, and don’t go silent.
If you have partial access to the backend, post a banner or popup message letting customers know what’s happening and how to get help (e.g., via phone or email).
Even if you can’t restore full functionality, setting expectations reduces confusion and support tickets.
Customer service will be flooded with the same question: “Is your website down?” Give them a clear, human-friendly script to save time and reduce stress. You can also set an auto-reply on your support inbox or chatbot with that same language.
Even while your site is offline, there’s plenty you can do to stay productive and reduce long-term fallout.
Even if the outage is affecting hundreds of merchants, submit a ticket to your platform. You want a paper trail. In localized outages, that ticket could make the difference in getting you back online faster.
Sometimes your storefront loads, but a critical part of your site doesn’t. Check on:
A partial failure in any of these systems can break your entire customer journey.
Start tracking:
This data will be critical for your post-mortem—and for any SLA-based refund claims you might pursue later.
The site is back online. You survived. Now make sure everything else is running the way it should.
Did you disable a payment method? Add a homepage warning? Pause automation?
Restore your normal settings so your customers aren’t left with confusing messages—or a half-working site.
Don’t assume everything works just because the homepage loads. Manually test:
Place a real order. Verify confirmations. Speed matters, but completeness matters more.
Even a 15-minute internal review helps you prepare for next time. Ask:
If possible, write a short recap for leadership so everyone understands what happened.
This isn’t required—but it works.
A short “thanks for your patience” email and a limited-time discount or freebie can go a long way toward turning a frustrating experience into brand loyalty.
Don’t hide from the issue. Acknowledge it, own it, and give customers a reason to come back.
We’ve put everything in this article into a single downloadable PDF checklist. Hand it off to your team the moment an outage happens, and they'll be able to cover every base without pressure.
