Shopify 45 Minute Outage Is the Biggest News This Week

"The horse is out of the barn already" is a term that comes to mind when I think about enacting a code freeze the week before Black Friday right after a 45 minute outage. The old eCommerce developer in me is reminded, isn't this Q4? Don't code freezes usually start mid-October timeframe at the earliest and November 1 at the latest?

At the beginning of the outage, I was randomly browsing some Shopify websites with an agency friend and noticed the outage around 3:27PM Eastern time. I have a few questions that I feel need to be asked as a result of this:

* If you don't proactively freeze code heading into the busiest time of year, when will you do it?

* Is it much of a status page if you can't even see the timeframe of the "recent events"? (It looks like the past two weeks)

* Aren't breaking database changes the riskiest type of change to attempt, regardless?

* Can't AI analyze and detect the risk of certain types of developer changes?

* How long until more transparency and trust become part of their Enterprise messaging instead of just innovation?

One of the first SaaS companies in the world, Salesforce, famously and successfully convinced the world that multi-tenant SaaS software was reliable; one way they did that was by having an extensive and detailed (I recall even multi-year) audit log of production issues to keep the company accountable.

Sadly, their vaunted trust (dot) salesforce (dot) com website is just a shell of what it used to be, only showing details for the past few weeks.

This leaves me with my last question for the community: what is Shopify's real uptime?

On a help page, sure, their marketing team says "99.99%", but that is 52 minutes per downtime a year. Considering they used up 45 of those minutes yesterday, I'm guessing that web page might need to change.

In addition to their QA processes, I would love to see some improvements to the Shopify status pages. It would benefit the entire community.

I'm sympathetic in some respects that there is no such thing as perfection in SaaS. Still... there are ways to get better here, and based on Shopify's desire to go much further up-market, it needs to hold itself to a much higher standard than just releasing more code than anyone else.

After all, it's not just the rebels relying on them anymore. And it's not just the rebels they are pitching anymore.