Coupang Apps Went Down Before Dawn, Halting Deliveries and Food Orders

Coupang's family of apps went down simultaneously, briefly halting dawn deliveries and food orders. Coupang and Coupang Eats suffered access errors in the early hours of the 8th, causing losses for users, small business owners, and delivery drivers alike. When the errors began, the Coupang app displayed a message saying the "service connection is unstable." The food delivery app Coupang Eats and the video streaming service Coupang Play were also knocked offline.

Some orders were canceled outright, and at some delivery hubs, dawn delivery vehicles were unable to depart on time. Small business owner Lee Choong-hwan said, "Neither food orders nor deliveries are working, and items are stuck in storage. The riders who were dispatched can't even mark their deliveries as complete, so they'll probably be carrying food around all day."

Coupang decided to compensate customers whose orders were canceled on Coupang and Coupang Eats with store credits. It said it will also provide compensation to affected restaurant owners and delivery drivers. However, revenue lost from orders never received in the first place must be absorbed by the business owners themselves.

The services were restored after about two and a half hours. Coupang explained that "a temporary error occurred during a service update." Amid recent bank hacking incidents, concerns about hacking were raised, but Coupang ruled out the possibility.

This is not the first Coupang Eats outage. In 2022, the platform suffered a system error that paralyzed its servers for about three hours, causing chaos during a holiday lunchtime rush.