Is Subbly down?

Between 31 August 2026 at 06:00 UTC and 2 September 2026 at 13:00 UTC, sales tax was not applied to some invoices created on Subbly. The cause was an upstream unexpected failure at TaxJar, the provider we use to calculate tax rates, which our system did not surface. Affected invoices were charged without the tax that should have applied. We have now corrected those invoices, collected the missing tax where it was owed, and notified everyone affected.

## Summary Between 31 August 2026 at 06:00 UTC and 2 September 2026 at 13:00 UTC, sales tax was not applied to some invoices created on Subbly. The cause was an upstream unexpected failure at TaxJar, the provider we use to calculate tax rates, which our system did not surface. Affected invoices were charged without the tax that should have applied. We have now corrected those invoices, collected the missing tax where it was owed, and notified everyone affected. ## What happened During this window TaxJar began returning 403 errors to our tax calculation requests without warning. Our billing engine treated a failed calculation as "no tax", built the invoice with a zero tax amount, and charged the customer the untaxed total. Because the failure was handled silently, no alert reached our team. We learned of the problem when it was reported to us, at which point the underlying TaxJar errors had already stopped. Only shops that rely on Subbly's own TaxJar integration were affected. Shops with their own TaxJar account, and shops with tax-inclusive pricing, did not undercharge their customers. ## What we did We identified every invoice created in the window that was missing tax and recalculated what the tax should have been, using the same calculation the original renewal or checkout would have used. For shops with tax-exclusive pricing, we charged the missing tax to the customer's payment method on file as a separate, clearly labelled sales tax invoice, and recorded the tax on the original invoice and order. Each of those customers received an email from the shop explaining the charge. Where a charge could not be collected, the shop owner has been told which customers were affected so they can decide how to follow up. For shops with tax-inclusive pricing, customers had already paid the correct amount, so we only recorded the missing tax breakdown on the invoices and orders. No charge was made and no customer email was sent. Every affected shop owner received a summary of exactly what was done for their store. ## What we are changing A failed tax calculation is no longer silent. Our team is now alerted immediately when the tax provider returns errors, so a problem like this would be caught within minutes rather than days. We are also working on fallback strategies for tax calculation, so that an upstream outage does not result in invoices being charged without tax. ### Our apology We are sorry for the inconvenience this caused you and your customers. We know an unexpected charge, however small and however well explained, is not something anyone wants to receive from a store they trust. And your trust in us as a platform is taken very seriously. If you have any questions about the affected invoices, the corrections we made, or the steps above, please reach out to us through the support chat in your admin and we will help.

Test incident for internal ops

The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.

This incident has been resolved.

We've temporarily disabled the checkouts to avoid double charges. The team is working on the fix.

We've identified the root cause and deployed a fix. Checkouts are fully operational again. We're keeping this incident open while we monitor checkout behavior and assess the impact on orders placed during the disruption. We'll post a final update once monitoring confirms stability.

Incident has been resolved and the system is fully operational. Check the postmortem for additional information.

Service Disruption - August 10, 2026 \(Resolved\) On August 10, between 12:39 and 14:08 UTC, checkout was not working, affecting 29 users and 77 purchases. The issue was caused by a routine update that relied on a database field mistakenly present in engineer's local development database and missing from production; a fix was deployed and all services were fully restored by 14:08 UTC. All the payments during this window were processed without orders or invoices being created. All affected charges should be refunded.

We are currently investigating an issue affecting some legacy builder websites. Impacted merchants may experience 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable errors when accessing their websites and the legacy editor. Our team is working to identify the root cause and restore service as quickly as possible.

The issue is being caused by a third-party service that powers our legacy website builder. We’re working with their team to restore service as quickly as possible. We currently expect the issue to take at least another 30 minutes to resolve, and we’ll continue to share updates as soon as we have them. While we work on resolving this, we’d also encourage merchants using the legacy builder to consider migrating to our new AI website builder. It’s our recommended and fully supported platform, and our team is happy to help make the transition as smooth as possible, including rebuilding your website if needed. Just contact support for more info, and we’ll help get you set up right away. Email [email protected]

We've resolved the issue affecting legacy builder websites, and all services should now be operating normally. Thank you for your patience.

We're aware of an issue preventing some users from accessing the Legacy Builder and some sites are down. Our team is actively investigating the cause and working on a fix. We apologize for the inconvenience and will share another update as soon as we have more information.

he issue has been resolved, and the Legacy Builder is now available again.