Google Merchant Center · Status at source date: Newsletter archive
A Shopify outage triggers mass Merchant Centre disapprovals
A widespread Shopify outage caused a significant wave of "product page unavailable" disapprovals across Google Merchant Centre, flagged by Chelsea Harding, Barry Schwartz, Catalina Koop, and Shivam Pandey. Google's crawler interpreted store pages as down during the incident and disapproved products even where the landing pages were live and loading correctly when tested manually.
What changed
The issue spanned multiple accounts across different industries.
Practitioners reported that once a storefront is confirmed operational, re-fetching the feed lets Google retrieve updated availability, and many disapprovals clear on the next successful crawl without intervention. Products that remain flagged can be cleared by requesting a review on the affected listings, though some accounts faced waits of up to 24 hours.
Why it matters for advertisers
For you, this means advertisers should check Merchant Centre for outage-related disapprovals before assuming a fault in a feed or website. Worth confirming the storefront is fully restored, re-fetching the feed, and only then requesting reviews on any products still flagged.
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Original newsletter text and archive evidence
A Shopify outage triggers mass Merchant Centre disapprovals
A widespread Shopify outage caused a significant wave of "product page unavailable" disapprovals across Google Merchant Centre, flagged by Chelsea Harding, Barry Schwartz, Catalina Koop, and Shivam Pandey. Google's crawler interpreted store pages as down during the incident and disapproved products even where the landing pages were live and loading correctly when tested manually. The issue spanned multiple accounts across different industries.
Practitioners reported that once a storefront is confirmed operational, re-fetching the feed lets Google retrieve updated availability, and many disapprovals clear on the next successful crawl without intervention. Products that remain flagged can be cleared by requesting a review on the affected listings, though some accounts faced waits of up to 24 hours.
For you, this means advertisers should check Merchant Centre for outage-related disapprovals before assuming a fault in a feed or website. Worth confirming the storefront is fully restored, re-fetching the feed, and only then requesting reviews on any products still flagged.
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