More than 6,500 shoppers reported trouble accessing the retailer’s eCommerce services, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing data from outage tracking site Downdetector. Close to three-quarters of users said they had problems with Walmart’s mobile app, while the remainder experienced trouble with the company’s website.
Some shoppers reported issues trying to check out or were unable to do so at all, according to the report.
Walmart did not reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
The outage for the world’s largest retailer comes at a time when the so-called five nines, or 99.999% uptime, have “become table stakes” for businesses, PYMNTS wrote last week.
This year has seen some high-profile outages, such as one involving PG&E earlier this month that cut power to nearly one-third of San Francisco, throwing self-driving and autonomous vehicles into a state of confusion.
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“Autonomous vehicles struggled, not because self-driving technology is inherently flawed, but because it was operating within a broader system that failed,” PYMNTS wrote.
Also this year, disruptions to AWS and Cloudflare darkened large swaths of the internet, including eCommerce platforms, media sites and cryptocurrency services.
As businesses look to 2026, the systems powering finance, commerce, mobility and communication are no longer being judged chiefly on innovation and capability, but on their ability to remain on.
“We had 100% uptime this year,” Entersekt Chief Strategy Officer Dewald Nolte told PYMNTS in an interview this month. “What you want is a Black Friday and not a blackout Friday. Our operations team is absolutely the unsung heroes.”
An uptime of 99.999% allows companies to be down only around five or so minutes over the course of the year. For payments businesses handling billions of dollars in transactions, that can represent millions of dollars of lost volume.
“Platform resiliency and business continuity planning, in my opinion, has been our No. 1 unsung hero,” Boost Payment Solutions Chief Technology Officer Rinku Sharma told PYMNTS in a separate interview this month.
