Why does my website show 'page not available' frequently?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Frequent “page temporarily unavailable” errors occur when Shopify rate-limits a location sending excessive web requests. Initially, support advised checking local causes (multiple devices, browser extensions, alternate browsers/incognito), and noted a brief platform incident affecting admin access that was resolved.

Root causes identified:

  • Theme/app scripts repeatedly failing and re-calling APIs (e.g., an app.js referenced in theme.liquid), triggering temporary IP blocks.
  • Misbehaving or expired app code; updating/removing the app resolved the issue for some.
  • A few users suspect DNS/CDN behavior; switching nameservers/DNS to Cloudflare reportedly stopped the errors for some stores.

Impacts and perspectives:

  • Merchants and customers experience intermittent lockouts, lost sales, and editor logouts, sometimes across devices.
  • Some argue Shopify should whitelist admin IPs to avoid blocking normal development workflows.

Actions/outcomes:

  • Use Chrome DevTools Network tab to find the initiator of repeated failing calls; fix or remove the offending script/app.
  • Try Cloudflare DNS as a workaround (reported success by multiple users).
  • If local troubleshooting fails, contact Shopify Support.

Status: Mixed. Several stores resolved issues via app/script fixes or DNS changes, but others report ongoing lockouts. Screenshots of error pages and a network trace showing request spamming support the diagnoses.

Summarized with AI on December 29. AI used: gpt-5.
20

Hi All,

I managed to get through to the shopify technical team and they came back
with a really helpful answer. (see below) *in summary it is an issue with
my theme which is causing this issue. *

Edvon has informed me of the issue you’re experiencing, having your IP
temporarily blocked with the error: This page is temporarily unavailable
because a device from your location is sending large amounts of web
requests. Visitors from other locations can still view the page.

I’ve looked into this occurring on your store, and I was actually able to
replicate it as well, being temporarily IP blocked as well, just from
browsing your storefront.

It is important to know that this error is expected behaviour, as we do
have protections in place on our platform to help detect and prevent
excessive inhuman activity and unauthorized API calls in web browsers and
clients in order to protect our platform integrity.

Looking at your storefront in the Google Chrome Developer Tools
<> in the network tab we can see
that there is a call being made and failing repeatedly and excessively,
this would explain the temporary IP block that we are experiencing. If you
hover over the initiator column for the calls being made we can see that
the calls are coming from a javascript file, app.js.

If we then take a look at your theme code, we can see the app.js file being
called in line 55 of your theme.liquid file. Since this is a third party
custom theme you have added to your store, this is not within our support
scope. In order to get this issue resolved, you will need to discuss this
with you theme developer and have them either fix the issue with the app.js
file making excessive api calls, or remove the script all together.

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