Weird placeholder value in Custom Metafields

Topic summary

A Shopify Plus store is experiencing unusual behavior with custom metafields across products. An AWS Lambda script successfully updates a ‘shipping_date’ metafield nightly to calculate business days before shipment, and this functionality continues working correctly.

However, a strange placeholder value has appeared in all custom metafields: #{" )gnp.IHvo9wkgQiHDH8ta65u0gQA4ZBc//:daolpu(]8141x0231|gnp.90.32.90 ta 51-10-4202 tohsneercS[!

Key observations:

  • The placeholder appears in metafields that the script doesn’t even fetch or update
  • Only the ‘shipping_date’ metafield value itself remains correct
  • The developer doesn’t believe their script caused this issue
  • Others have reportedly noticed similar behavior

Current status: The issue remains unresolved, with the developer seeking guidance on how to immediately fix this unexpected placeholder value appearance.

Summarized with AI on November 13. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.

On a shopify plus store I’m working with, we implemented a script that runs on AWS Lambda and updates a custom metafield ‘shipping_date’ every night to reflect the correct amount of business days before a product can be shipped out. This was working perfectly (and still is), but I checked the admin panel today, and saw some weird behaviour.

I don’t believe my script is the cause of this, but somehow now all custom metafields in the products have a placeholder value ‘#{" "}’. I didn’t even fetch or update all of these products, nor any of the metafields except for the 1 ‘shipping_date’ value. The shipping date is also still correctly updated, so that’s why I don’t think this behavior is caused by my script.

How did this happen, and have others noticed a similar behavior, a sudden placeholder value? I’m not sure how to immediately resolve this.