The extended Google Cloud outage was a big problem for small shops

A major blackout on Sunday caused many online services to fall, including Snapchat, YouTube, and Gmail.

The Google Cloud outage also caused problems with Shopify, an ecommerce and point-of-sale platform that powers thousands of online and physical stores around the world.

While the Google Cloud and Shopify failures were largely resolved on Sunday night, the extended downtime also left some companies in disarray, leaving orders unfulfilled and, crucial, missed sales.

Mackenzie Stith, who works for Pratt Daddy Crystals in Los Angeles, said the blackout had "completely destroyed our era."

"We've probably lost several thousand dollars in sales in about five hours," Stith told Mashable by email.

"In addition to that, we are currently holding summer sales, and so we have both more orders than ever before in the history of the company, which are not yet executed. Around 500 orders are not currently executed. "

Stith stated that she had gone to work on a Sunday to run as many orders as possible, but that the breakdown had prevented her from dealing with one. The company now has to reimburse late orders, and Stith said she could not even respond to e-mails, the vast majority of whom asked Shopify to answer these questions.

Sarah Moret, who runs Curie, a Los Angeles-based natural deodorant company, has faced many of the same problems as a result of the blackout.

"Sunday is normally one of our best selling days, so it was frustrating to get to work and to see that our site would not even take care of it." The back end of our site was down, so we could not respond to any order, see customer information, or respond to customer support tickets, "explained Moret via Twitter DM.

The website of the jewelry brand Luca + Danni, located in Rhode Island, has also been out of service for more than five hours.

"We lost significant revenue during the important graduation period," David Shaks, President of Luca + Danni, told Mashable by email.

This outage also meant that Oksman was likely to waste money on ads while the brand's website was down, which would lead potential customers to a dead end. He was also concerned that the suspension of the announcement would jeopardize his future performance.

With some companies whose budget is largely reduced, the Shopify outage has raised questions about how to avoid future, extended blackouts like Sunday's, and about the presence of a backup plan.

"I think Shopify relying solely on a vendor without a failover process to quickly reroute their traffic to other data centers is probably bad planning for their DevOps team," said Dennis Hegstad, co-founder of the e-commerce start-up LiveRecover.

"When they have 550,000 stores using their content management system, they have to do better than seven hours of inactivity."

The prolonged failure has also caused some people to wonder if there were too few companies that control the cloud and e-commerce market.

"As a young brand, it's very difficult to deal with uncontrollable problems like this," added Oksman.

"You understand that people are doing everything they can to avoid problems, but that indicates a potential weakness of the overall web infrastructure when very few organizations (Google, Amazon, etc.). ) control such a high percentage of websites. "

For Hegsted, it's just a matter of preparation. "It seems to be a bigger problem to let some companies control the majority of the market, but realistically this could be avoided by better planning," he said.

"Be prepared for the worst, there is probably always a way to avoid such catastrophes."

"Be prepared for the worst, there is probably always a way to avoid such catastrophes."

In a statement to Mashable, Shopify said: "On June 2, Shopify suffered a Google Cloud outage that made all the stores inaccessible, we worked with them to solve the problem and the stores are now accessible."

On its Status page, Shopify said that it "will strive to fully understand how this widespread failure of the Internet infrastructure has affected our platform" in the coming days.

For those who run a shopify-managed store that we talked to about this story, the crash did not discourage them from using the platform. In fact, everything says that it worked well for them until Sunday. Shop owners would rather have Shopify become more communicative.

"It was frustrating and I would have liked Shopify to communicate more proactively," Moret said.

"They have our contact information, I would have liked that they immediately warn the store owners of the outage and explain the problem so that we can be proactive about it."