SubscriptionContracts bulk query returns INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR

Retired Boards Appdev Subscriptions
,

Topic summary

Issue: Starting August 11, 2023 at 18:50 UTC, bulk queries for SubscriptionContracts began returning INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR without any application changes.

Impact: The error persisted for over 24 hours, causing significant business disruption.

Resolution: Shopify appears to have recovered from the outage.

Related Problems: Multiple subscription-related issues occurred during the same weekend:

  • Intermittent delivery of subscription_contracts/create webhooks since Friday
  • Webhook admin portal showing virtually no webhooks sent, despite some being received

Recommended Action: Users experiencing similar issues should contact Shopify Partner Support with the x-request-id and timestamp from API response headers for deeper investigation.

Status: Issue resolved but awaiting official acknowledgment from Shopify partner team.

Summarized with AI on November 17. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Since 2023-08-11 18:50 UTC all our bulk queries for SubscriptionContracts are returning INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR. We have not changed anything in our application. The queries just started failing. Needless to say this is quite a big problem for our business.

Example of one query where I removed everything except contract id: 01c44309-3665-4607-9972-282d1cfbe2e5:

query AllSubscriptionContracts {
  subscriptionContracts {
    __typename
    edges {
      __typename
      node {
        __typename
        id
      }
    }
  }
}

Here is response:

BulkOperation gid://shopify/BulkOperation/4084048953668 (with status FAILED) exception caused by SERVER with error message: INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR
ShopifyBulkOperationException(bulkOperationId=gid://shopify/BulkOperation/4084048953668, query=query AllSubscriptionContracts { subscriptionContracts { __typename edges { __typename node { __typename id } } } }, type=SERVER, status=FAILED, errorMessage=INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR)
2

Hi Cleankitchen,

This doesn’t sound ideal for sure. The best option here would be to contact Shopify Partner Support through your partner dashboard and provide the x-request-id along with the timestamp that you received in the API response headers, so our API support team can look into this deeper.

Hope this helps!

3

It looks like Shopify recovered. But yes this error was happening for more than 24 hours :disappointed_face:

4

Seems like a few subscription-related issues were going on this weekend. We were only intermittently getting subscription_contracts/create webhooks since Friday, which caused a bunch of chaos. The Webhooks admin page in the partner portal is showing that virtually no webhooks were sent, even though we did receive some.

Hopefully partners team can acknowledge an issue.