I asked Shopify why my store was blocking customers. They told me it was working correctly. For weeks support told me nothing was wrong and the platform was performing as expected, while Shopify staff were posting in this very thread acknowledging the VPN problem is real and unresolved. I sent them…

Huh interesting, I’ve actually come across this as a consumer - I assumed they had broken their theme :skull:

@ceri_waters yeah it’s happening across all sites. i’ve repeatedly broken different ones and not always when using a VPN. When you look at the HAR files shop pay repeatedly sends requests to check if the user has a login. we are talking 8-9 times without a response on a normal product page. the user…

As you explained, I had it through the Facebook browser - saw a Facebook Ad with something interesting, clicked on it, it went through to a Shopify store (i checked) and yup the result was blank.

By any chance, were you using a VPN? Because I am arguing that it isn’t confined to VPN usage and I think their fix that they talk about in the other threads actually just removed the 429 error notification because I’ve got screen recordings of the site erroring out at add to cart and cart just like…

Bingo. Thanks for confirming. That’s incredibly helpful. I have seen a 30% drop in sales and this is just more evidence that it’s a direct result of this fault. and worse EVERY merchant is having the same issue and probably just blaming the bad sales on Meta…

@Paige-Shopify @Billy-Shopify @Steve-Shopify @Ken-Shopify @Wes-Shopify Can you please respond to this? I have once again been told by support everything is fine when tonnes of people are coming forward on this thread and the other to say it’s not. it’s not confined to VPN. It’s happening to real cus…

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Hannah. To make sure I understand the issue correctly, you’ve observed this on: In-app Meta browsers such as Facebook’s browser While using a VPN

I confirm here, VPN (even paid and quality ones) are often blocked by Shopify web stores.

Urgent - fix your platform - merchants this affects you too

Community Feedback

Hannah_Hoskins August 3, 2026, 4:08pm 2

Here is the link to the thread where they admit the issue. I am posting here as I have gotten no where with support who told me that I was a bot and correctly filtered out… Aggressive bot detection with 429 errors AJAX Cart API - #103 by Paige-Shopify

Topic		Replies	Views
Bug: 429 page errors are too aggressive Shopify App Store dev-stores	57	2570	August 4, 2026
Aggressive bot detection with 429 errors AJAX Cart API Online Store and Theme Development ajax-api	108	3521	September 11, 2026
Large spike in 403 error responses from the ajax cart form cloudflare verification Extensions theme-app-extension	6	107	September 4, 2026
Shopify Ajax API returning Cloudflare 403 verification errors Hydrogen and Storefront APIs storefront-api	17	690	June 29, 2026
Third-party Web Bot Auth crawler receives immediate 429s from OCI but succeeds residentially Online Store and Theme Development performance	4	117	August 17, 2026

Urgent - fix your platform - merchants this affects you too

Related topics