Walmart outage impacts thousands of shoppers using app and website

Walmart's website went down on Tuesday morning, leaving thousands of shoppers locked out of both the site and its app, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Shortly after 7am on Tuesday, more than 6,500 users reported they could not access Walmart's site or app, according to DownDetector. Approximately three-quarters of the complaints involved the mobile app, while another quarter involved the website.

“We experienced a brief outage early this morning, all systems were quickly restored,” a Walmart spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

One of Walmart’s recent investment priorities has been upgrading its e-commerce capabilities to keep competitive with Amazon. Those investments appear to have paid off, as the company’s digital sales grew by 28 percent last quarter over the same time period last year, Bloomberg reports.

As of noon, the Walmart website appears to be working and no further outage spikes have been logged at DownDetector.

A similar outage affected Shopify earlier this year. On Cyber Monday — one of the busiest online shopping days of the year in the U.S. — online retailer hub Shopify experienced an outage that prevented shoppers from checking out with their items.

That outage lasted much of the morning and continued into the early afternoon. Later that day the number of outage reports began to dwindle, according to CNBC.