Outage Playbooks

Why these playbooks exist

When a third-party app goes down, the impact on your store depends on how that app is used.

Blind Spot Monitor includes playbook guidance in incidents and alerts for many popular services. This page explains the most common patterns so you can respond faster and reduce downtime impact.

How Blind Spot personalizes playbooks

Blind Spot’s recommendations are most useful when they reflect your store’s usage.

• Some vendors have app-specific playbooks (for example, Klaviyo vs Recharge).
• If Blind Spot doesn’t have a vendor-specific playbook yet, it falls back to category guidance (email, payments, shipping, etc.).
• When you add an App Library status monitor, Blind Spot may ask a quick question or two (marketing vs transactional, payments/subscriptions dependency) to show more accurate impact guidance.
• You can update these any time from Monitors → Playbook on the relevant Status Page monitor.

Email & SMS (marketing vs transactional)

Common examples: Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, Sendlane, Postscript, Attentive.

Likely impact

• Marketing campaigns / automated flows: revenue impact from delayed promos, abandoned cart flows, and launch emails.
• Transactional messaging: customers may miss order confirmations, shipping notifications, password resets, and other critical updates.

What to do now

• Pause time-sensitive campaigns/flows until sending is stable.
• Ensure Shopify’s native notifications are enabled for order/shipping updates (as a short-term fallback).
• Use a temporary site banner and support macros to set expectations while the vendor recovers.

How to prepare next time

• Decide which messages are must-send (transactional) vs nice-to-have (marketing).
• Keep a backup sender plan for urgent transactional comms (plus a few pre-written templates).
• Document a simple “pause sends + customer comms” checklist your team can follow.

Payments (checkout and payment methods)

Common examples: Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, Affirm.

Likely impact

• Some or all payments may fail (or degrade), increasing checkout abandonment.
• Payment-related webhooks may delay downstream workflows (refunds, post-purchase automations, subscription retries).

What to do now

• Ensure alternative payment methods are available (card, accelerated methods, wallet options).
• Monitor failed checkouts and be ready to help customers complete purchases manually.

How to prepare next time

• Keep at least one backup payment option enabled/configured.
• Document a short “payment outage” checklist (what to enable/disable, who to notify, what to communicate).

Subscriptions

Common examples: Recharge, Skio, Ordergroove.

Likely impact

• Subscription checkout, renewals, and portal actions may fail or delay.
• Support volume may rise (“my renewal failed”, “I can’t manage my subscription”).

What to do now

• Pause subscription promotions (avoid driving customers into a broken flow).
• Communicate expected delays and route customers to support for high-priority changes.
• Offer a one-time purchase fallback where possible.

How to prepare next time

• Keep a fallback one-time purchase flow ready and documented.
• Pre-write customer support macros for subscription outages.

Shipping & fulfillment

Common examples: ShipStation, Shippo, ShipBob, EasyPost.

Likely impact

• Label creation, rate quoting, order sync, and tracking events may delay.
• Fulfillment SLAs may slip if label workflows are blocked.

What to do now

• Fulfill urgent orders via Shopify admin and print labels from carrier portals if needed.
• Set expectations for shipping timelines (banner/support macros) if delays are likely.

How to prepare next time

• Keep carrier logins accessible and a manual label workflow documented.
• Maintain a “fallback shipping rates” configuration (simple flat rates) you can enable quickly.

Reviews & on-site widgets

Common examples: Yotpo, Okendo, Judge.me, Loox.

Likely impact

• Review widgets and UGC sections may not load.
• In some cases, broken scripts can slow down pages and hurt conversion.

What to do now

• Validate storefront performance (homepage + product pages).
• If a widget/script is causing errors, temporarily disable it until the vendor recovers.

How to prepare next time

• Document how to disable the widget quickly.
• Ensure core purchase paths don’t depend on review widgets to function.

Returns

Common examples: Loop Returns, AfterShip (returns/tracking).

Likely impact

• Returns portals and exchanges may be unavailable.

What to do now

• Route returns to support (email/form) and process high-priority returns manually.

How to prepare next time

• Maintain a manual returns workflow and a customer-facing outage message template.

Fraud / order protection

Common examples: Signifyd, Riskified.

Likely impact

• Automated fraud decisions may delay, increasing risk or slowing fulfillment.

What to do now

• Switch to manual review for higher-risk orders and use Shopify’s built-in signals until recovery.

How to prepare next time

• Define manual-review rules and keep a short checklist for outage periods.

Customer support (helpdesk + live chat)

Common examples: Gorgias, Zendesk, Intercom.

Likely impact

• Ticket intake, automations, and chat workflows may be delayed.
• Your team may lose visibility into ongoing conversations.

What to do now

• Route urgent issues to a backup inbox (email) or a simple contact form.
• Set expectations with customers (site banner + saved replies) until the vendor recovers.

How to prepare next time

• Keep a backup “support intake” path ready (email inbox + form).
• Save outage macros for common issues (order status, refunds, subscription changes).

Advertising platforms (campaign delivery + attribution)

Common examples: Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads.

Likely impact

• Campaign delivery and attribution may be degraded.
• If checkout is also impacted, spend can burn budget with poor conversion.

What to do now

• If checkout is unhealthy, pause time-sensitive spend and retargeting until recovery.
• Validate conversion tracking after the platform recovers (events, pixel, gtag).

How to prepare next time

• Decide a clear “pause spend” threshold (for example: checkout incident opens → pause).
• Keep a short checklist for your team: pause, validate checkout, validate tracking, resume.

Analytics & tracking

Common examples: GA4, Triple Whale, Northbeam, Meta Pixel.

Likely impact

• Reporting may be delayed or inaccurate.
• Attribution gaps can cause bad budget decisions if you react too quickly.

What to do now

• Avoid major budget changes based on partial data.
• Validate key events after recovery (page view, add to cart, purchase).

How to prepare next time

• Maintain a simple “tracking validation” checklist (events/pixels) and run it after theme updates and outages.
• Keep backup reporting sources where possible (Shopify analytics, platform reports).

Infrastructure (CDN, hosting, cloud)

Common examples: Cloudflare, AWS, Fastly, Vercel.

Likely impact

• Storefront access/performance may degrade broadly (even if your own code didn’t change).

What to do now

• Validate critical journeys from multiple networks/devices.
• Roll back recent DNS/CDN changes if they’re amplifying the issue.
• Communicate proactively (banner/support macros) if customers are impacted.

How to prepare next time

• Keep a dependency map (payments, email, CDN, fulfillment) and ensure redundancy for the most revenue-critical paths.
• Document “safe defaults” and rollback steps for DNS/WAF/CDN configuration.