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Full-Site Outages and Regional Access Errors: What They Mean and What to Do

Sometimes your storefront or WSM admin may become unreachable, or a customer in another country may be blocked from your site. This article explains two specific situations and how to respond to each.

Note: If you're seeing a 500 error on a single page while the rest of your site works normally, that's a different situation. Please see our separate article, "Troubleshooting 500 and Server Errors," instead.

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Situation 1: Your Whole Site or Admin Is Down

You may run into one of these when your entire storefront or WSM admin stops loading:

    • 502 Bad Gateway
    • 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
    • 504 Gateway Time-Out
    • A generic message such as "Oops! An unexpected error has occurred" or "An unexpected error"
    • Pages that hang, load very slowly, or crash before finishing

What this usually means

When your entire site or admin is affected this way, it almost always points to a site-wide service issue rather than a problem inside your own store settings. In other words, this typically isn't something you accidentally changed or can fix from your admin panel — it's a platform-level condition that our team resolves on the server side.

Because these outages are broad, changing your own settings usually won't help and may not be necessary.

What to do

    • Check the current service status. Visit our "Service Status of Web Shop Manager" article to see whether there's a known, ongoing outage. This tells you if the issue is already being worked on.
    • Use the urgent-contact guidance in that same article. It provides the correct, up-to-date way to reach our team quickly when your site is down — so you don't lose time trying to track down the right channel.
    • Avoid making changes to your store settings while a suspected outage is in progress, since the cause is typically on the platform side.
Tip: If these errors have happened more than once, mention that when you reach out. Noting the dates and times helps our team investigate recurring patterns.

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Situation 2: Only Customers From a Specific Country or Region Get a "403 Forbidden"

In this scenario, your site works normally for you and most visitors, but a customer in a particular country or region — for example, someone traveling or shopping from abroad — sees a 403 Forbidden message. They often report that they can usually access your site with no trouble, and that it fails on both mobile and desktop.

What this usually means

This is an international access issue, not a full-site outage. It happens when protective security filtering blocks traffic from a specific location. It can be adjusted so the affected visitor can reach your site again.

What to do

    • Confirm the details. Note the customer's approximate location (country/region) and confirm your site loads normally for other visitors.
    • Contact WSM Support. Because resolving a regional 403 requires adjusting security rules on our side, this needs to be handled by our team. Provide:
    •  The country or region the blocked customer is in
    •  Confirmation that the site works for other visitors
    •  The specific message the customer sees (403 Forbidden)

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Quick Reference

| What you're seeing | Likely cause | Where to go |

| Whole site/admin down (502, 503, 504, "unexpected error") | Site-wide service issue | "Service Status of Web Shop Manager" article |

| Single page shows a 500 error, rest of site works | Page/setting-specific | "Troubleshooting 500 and Server Errors" article |

| One country/region gets 403 Forbidden | Regional security filtering | Contact WSM Support with the customer's location |