Outages on Shopify’s e-commerce platform have been resolved, the company said late Monday, bringing to an end a daylong glitch on the annual ‘Cyber Monday’ shopping day.
Some merchants that use Shopify’s service to sell goods online said they experienced issues with checkouts through the company’s point-of-sale system.
Businesses that run on Shopify also had trouble logging into their administrative portals.
In a statement, Shopify said: ‘We had a system degradation that has now been mitigated.’
Throughout the day, business owners posted angry messages directed at the company on X, where Shopify President Harvey Finkelstein had posted ‘HAPPY CYBER MONDAY! Let’s finish strong!’ earlier in the day, with an emoji of a flexed arm.
One business, Costack Spices, based in London, replied: ‘How??? [We] cannot fulfill orders or log on,’ with three red-faced emojis. In a follow-up, the company posted, ‘This is unbelievable.’
Another user wrote, ‘@ShopifySupport I haven’t been able to access it for the last couple hours.’
Shopify replied to most users on X with the same message: ‘We are aware of an issue with Admins impacting selected stores, and are working to resolve it.’
In 2024, merchants using Shopify services recorded $11.5 billion in sales from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, the company said, with more than 76 million customers buying from businesses powered by the platform.
Shopify provides website design tools, online checkout services and digital advertising products to businesses of all sizes. The company says that millions of merchants use its services.
While Shopify’s share of Cyber Monday sales may be limited, smaller businesses that rely on the company to process their transactions may have missed out on crucial sales at the start of the all-important holiday season.
Total Cyber Monday sales are expected to be more than $53 billion, according to Salesforce.
PARIS — Airbus fleets were returning toward normal operations on Monday after the European plane maker pushed through abrupt software changes faster than expected, as it wrestled with safety headlines long focused on rival Boeing.
Dozens of airlines from Asia to the United States said they had carried out a snap software retrofit ordered by Airbus, and mandated by global regulators, after a vulnerability to solar flares emerged in a recent mid-air incident on a JetBlue A320.
Airbus said on Monday that the vast majority of around 6,000 of its A320-family fleet affected by the safety alert had been modified, with fewer than 100 jets still requiring work.
JetBlue Airbus A320 planes at LaGuardia Airport in New York City.Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty Images file
But some require a longer process and Colombia’s Avianca continued to halt bookings for dates until December 8.
Sources familiar with the matter said the unprecedented decision to recall about half the A320-family fleet was taken shortly after the possible but unproven link to a drop in altitude on the JetBlue jet emerged late last week.
Shares in Airbus were down 2.1% in early trading in Paris.
Following talks with regulators, Airbus issued its 8-page alert to hundreds of operators on Friday, effectively ordering a temporary grounding by ordering the repair before next flight.
“The thing hit us about 9 p.m. [Jeddah time] and I was back in here about 9:30. I was actually quite surprised how quickly we got through it: there are always complexities,” said Steven Greenway, CEO of Saudi budget carrier Flyadeal.
The instruction was seen as the broadest emergency recall in the company’s history and raised immediate concerns of travel disruption particularly during the busy U.S. Thanksgiving weekend.
The sweeping warning exposed the fact that Airbus does not have full real-time awareness of which software version is used given reporting lags, industry sources said.
At first airlines struggled to gauge the impact since the blanket alert lacked affected jets’ serial numbers. A Finnair passenger said a flight was delayed on the tarmac for checks.
Over 24 hours, engineers zeroed in on individual jets.
Several airlines revised down estimates of the number of jets impacted and time needed for the work, which Airbus initially pegged at three hours per plane.
“It has come down a lot,” an industry source said on Sunday, referring to the overall number of aircraft affected.
The fix involved reverting to an earlier version of software that handles the nose angle. It involves uploading the previous version via a cable from a device called a data loader, which is carried into the cockpit to prevent cyberattacks.
At least one major airline faced delays because it lacked enough data loaders to handle dozens of jets in such a short time, according to an executive speaking privately.
UK’s easyJet and Wizz Air said on Monday they had completed the updates over the weekend without cancelling any flights.
JetBlue said late Sunday it expected to have completed work to return to service 137 of 150 impacted aircraft by Monday and plans to cancel approximately 20 flights for Monday due to the issue.
Questions remain over a subset of generally older A320-family jets that will need a new computer rather than a mere software reset. The number of those involved has been reduced below initial estimates of 1,000, industry sources said.
Industry executives said the weekend furor highlighted changes in the industry’s playbook since the Boeing 737 MAX crisis, in which the U.S. plane maker was heavily criticized over its handling of fatal crashes blamed on a software design error.
It is the first time Airbus has had to deal with global safety attention on such a scale since that crisis. CEO Guillaume Faury publicly apologized in a deliberate shift of tone for an industry beset by lawsuits and conservative public relations. Boeing has also declared itself more open.
“Is Airbus acting with the Boeing MAX crisis in mind? Absolutely — every company in the aviation sector is,” said Ronn Torossian, chairman of New York-based 5W Public Relations.
“Boeing paid the reputational price for hesitation and opacity. Airbus clearly wants to show … a willingness to say, ‘We could have done better.’ That resonates with regulators, customers, and the flying public.”
Campbell’s has fired an executive accused of making racist comments and mocking its products and customers, the company announced on Wednesday.
The termination follows a lawsuit filed in Michigan by former employee Robert Garza against Campbell’s, the company’s then-vice president of information technology Martin Bally and another manager.
The complaint alleges retaliation and a hostile work environment, citing a November 2024 meeting between Bally and Garza to discuss salary, according to the lawsuit.
Garza allegedly recorded the conversation, and the audio — obtained by NBC News — is more than 90 minutes long.
During the interaction, the lawsuit alleges that Bally described Campbell’s as “highly process(ed) food” and said it was for “poor people.” He also allegedly made racist remarks about Indian workers, calling them “idiots.”
‘After a review, we believe the voice on the recording is in fact Martin Bally,’ Campbell’s said Wednesday. ‘The comments were vulgar, offensive and false, and we apologize for the hurt they have caused.’
The company said it does not tolerate the language used in the audio recording and the behavior “does not reflect” its values.
Campbell’s said it learned of the litigation and first heard segments of the audio on Nov. 20.
Bally’s termination was effective Tuesday, the company said.
According to the lawsuit, Garza told his manager, J.D. Aupperle — who is also named as a defendant, about Bally’s behavior in January 2025 and wanted to report the comments to the human resources department. He was not encouraged to report the comments, the lawsuit claims, and was then ‘abruptly terminated from employment’ later that month.
‘This situation has been very hard on Robert,’ Garza’s attorney, Zachary Runyan, said in a statement to NBC News on Tuesday. ‘He thought Campbell’s would be thankful that he reported Martin’s behavior, but instead he was abruptly fired.’
Garza is seeking monetary damages from the company.
Bally and Aupperle did not immediately return requests for comment on Wednesday.
Campbell’s said it is ‘proud of the food we make’ and ‘the comments heard on the recording about our food are not only inaccurate — they are patently absurd.’
Bitcoin and ether slumped to multi-month lows on Friday, with cryptocurrencies swept up in a broader flight from riskier assets as investors worried about lofty tech valuations and bets on near-term U.S. interest rate cuts faded.
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, fell 5.5% to a seven-month low of $81,668. Ether slid more than 6% to $2,661.37, its lowest in four months.
Both tokens are down roughly 12% so far this week.
Cryptocurrencies are often viewed as a barometer of risk appetite and their slide highlights how fragile the mood in markets has turned in recent days, with high-flying artificial intelligence stocks tumbling and volatility spiking VIX.
“If it’s telling a story about risk sentiment as a whole, then things could start to get really, really ugly, and that’s the concern now,” Tony Sycamore, a market analyst at IG, said of the fall in bitcoin.
About $1.2 trillion has been wiped off the market value of all cryptocurrencies in the past six weeks, according to market tracker CoinGecko.
Bitcoin’s slide follows a stellar run this year that propelled it to a record high above $120,000 in October, buoyed by favourable regulatory changes towards crypto assets globally.
But analysts say the market remains scarred by a record single-day slump last month that saw more than $19 billion of positions liquidated.
“The market feels a little bit dislocated, a bit fractured, a bit broken, really, since we had that selloff,” said Sycamore.
Bitcoin has since erased all its year-to-date gains and is now down 12% for the year, while ether has lost close to 19%.
Citi analyst Alex Saunders said $80,000 would be an important level as it is around the average level of bitcoin holdings in ETFs.
The selloff has also hurt share prices of crypto stockpilers, following a boom in public digital asset treasury companies this year as corporates took advantage of rising prices to buy and hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets.
Shares of Strategy, once the poster child for corporate bitcoin accumulation, have fallen 11% this week and were down nearly 4% in premarket trade, languishing at one-year lows.
JP Morgan said in a note this week that the company could be excluded from some MSCI equity indexes, which could spark forced selling by funds that track them.
Its Japanese peer Metaplanet has tumbled about 80% from a June peak.
Crypto exchange Coinbase was down 1.9% in premarket trade and is on course for its longest losing streak in more than a month.
Crypto miners MARA Holdings and CleanSpark were down 2.4% and 3.6%, respectively, while the Winklevoss twins’ newly-listed Gemini has plunged 62% from its listing price.
“Bitcoin market conditions are the most bearish they have been since the current bull cycle started in January 2023,” said digital asset research firm CryptoQuant in its weekly crypto report on Wednesday.
“We are highly likely to have seen most of this cycle’s demand wave pass.”
MADISON, Wis. — Early voting kicked off in this battleground state this week with computer delays and long lines.
Voters waited as long as three hours Tuesday to cast ballots in West Bend, a city of about 32,000, city clerk Jilline Dobratz said. State computer issues reared up again Wednesday, and by midafternoon, voters had to wait about 90 minutes to vote in the community 40 miles northwest of Milwaukee, she said. Residents were not used to anything like it.
A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.
Sister Stephanie Schmidt had a hunch about what her fellow nuns would discuss over dinner at their Erie, Pennsylvania, monastery on Wednesday night.
The day before, a Republican operative in the battleground state falsely suggested to his nearly 58,000 followers on X that no one lived at the monastery and that mail ballots cast from there would be “illegal votes.” Cliff Maloney, who hired 120 people to go door-to-door across Pennsylvania urging Republican voters to return their mail ballots, wrote on X that one of those workers had “discovered” an Erie address where 53 people were registered to vote but “NO ONE lives there.”
DULUTH, Ga. — Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson warmed up the crowd at Donald Trump’s rally here Wednesday night with a dark metaphor, bashing Vice President Kamala Harris and declaring that “dad” was coming home to mete out discipline.
“He’s pissed!” Carlson said to extended cheers. “Dad is pissed. … And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”
