Control Panel and Webstore Disruption

Summary

On 30 April 2026, some merchants experienced intermittent disruption when accessing storefronts and the Control Panel. During the incident, some storefront pages may have intermittently displayed a “We’ll be back online shortly” message, while some Control Panel access may also have been affected.

The incident was caused by a significant spike in automated traffic directed at the platform, which placed abnormal load on the caching and application layers. This resulted in intermittent availability and degraded performance for affected services.

Root Cause

The disruption was caused by a large volume of automated traffic targeting the platform. This traffic created abnormal load on the caching layer, which is used to support efficient delivery of storefront and Control Panel content.

As traffic volumes increased, the caching and application layers became degraded, resulting in intermittent access issues for some merchants.

Resolution

Our teams identified the unusual traffic pattern and implemented targeted mitigation rules to reduce the impact of the automated traffic. Once the mitigation was applied, the caching and application layers stabilised, and services returned to normal.

We continued monitoring after service recovery to ensure the platform remained stable.

Preventative Actions

To reduce the likelihood and impact of similar events in future, we have taken the following actions:

• Strengthened traffic filtering and mitigation rules for abnormal request patterns.
• Improved monitoring for sudden traffic spikes and automated traffic fingerprints.
• Reviewed the traffic behaviour with our traffic protection provider to better identify similar patterns in future.
• Continued tuning of platform protection rules to reduce the impact of high-volume automated traffic.