Shopify resolves login issues that impacted thousands of users on Cyber Monday

 Shopify just weathered its worst possible timing for a platform outage. The e-commerce giant went down Monday morning, cutting off thousands of merchants from processing transactions during Cyber Monday - the year's biggest online shopping day. The company has since resolved the authentication issues that locked merchants out of their stores and point-of-sale systems.

Shopify just lived through every e-commerce platform's nightmare scenario. The company's authentication systems failed this morning, cutting off merchants from their stores and payment processing capabilities right as Cyber Monday shoppers flooded online retailers with deal-hunting traffic. The timing couldn't have been worse for a platform that processes over 10% of all U.S. e-commerce transactions. Reports started flooding in around 6:45 AM Pacific Time, with merchants unable to log into their Shopify accounts or access point-of-sale systems. For store owners counting on Cyber Monday to drive fourth-quarter revenue, the outage meant watching potential sales slip away during the year's most critical shopping window. The cascading impact hit both online storefronts and physical retail locations using Shopify's POS systems. Downdetector logged approximately 4,000 outage reports as frustrated merchants and customers encountered login failures and transaction processing errors. The scale suggests thousands of businesses were affected across Shopify's merchant base. According to Shopify's status page, the company identified the root cause as problems with its login authentication flow - the system that verifies merchant credentials and grants access to accounts. This explains why both web-based admin panels and physical POS terminals experienced simultaneous failures. The company worked through the morning to restore service, with engineers focusing on the authentication bottleneck that was preventing legitimate users from accessing their accounts. By early afternoon, Shopify confirmed it had implemented a fix and was monitoring recovery across its platform. The company's status updates indicated that normal service was returning, though they warned merchants to expect longer wait times for customer support as teams handled the backlog of outage-related inquiries. For merchants, the outage represents lost revenue during a day when many retailers generate significant portions of their annual online sales. Cyber Monday typically drives billions in e-commerce transactions, with shoppers actively seeking deals and making purchase decisions. Every minute offline translated to missed opportunities and frustrated customers. The incident highlights the critical infrastructure role that platforms like Shopify play in modern retail. When authentication systems fail, the ripple effects extend far beyond technical inconvenience - they directly impact merchant revenue and customer experience during peak shopping periods. The company's rapid response and transparent communication through status updates helped merchants understand the scope and timeline for resolution. However, the outage raises questions about system redundancy and failover capabilities during high-traffic periods like major shopping holidays.

Platform outages during peak shopping events underscore the delicate balance between handling massive traffic spikes and maintaining system reliability. For Shopify, quick resolution was essential - but the incident serves as a reminder that authentication systems need robust redundancy when millions of merchants depend on them for their livelihoods. As online commerce continues growing, platform operators face increasing pressure to ensure their infrastructure can handle both planned traffic surges and unexpected technical failures without disrupting the businesses that rely on them.

https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/shopify-outage-resolved-after-disrupting-cyber-monday-sales

Trump administration to inject up to $150 million into XLight, WSJ reports

 The Trump ‌administration has agreed to take an equity stake ⁠in former ‌Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's ‍XLight startup, the Wall Street ​Journal reported on ‌Monday, citing the U.S. Commerce Department.

The newspaper ⁠said the ​Trump administration ​will inject up to $150 million ‍into ⁠the company.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-administration-inject-150-million-012134376.html

'He has a point, but he's too blunt.'

 by J.K. Rowling

From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it's proved shockingly successful. Trans activists' shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they've been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step. Time and again, I've seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. 'Well, yes, maybe there's something in what you're saying, but it's hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can't you be nice? Why won't you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don't you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?' As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, 'it's not that I couldn't see your point, but did you have to say it that way?' We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it 'gender affirming care.' We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn't exist. Either a man can be a woman, or he can't. Either women deserve rights, or they don't. Either there's a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn't. Either you're on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you're not. The alternative to being 'blunt' - using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on - was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We've always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.

https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1995491771950797148

Why Support Israel

 Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to return to this often contentious subject in the news of why the United States supports Israel.

I must come clean. I am not a Christian Zionist. I feel I’m a Christian, but I have no special advocacy to support Israel because it’s a biblical home of the Jews and, by extension, the Judeo-Christian traditions of which I am a member.

And I can even confess, as a rural resident who grew up isolated on a farm, I don’t recall anybody being Jewish. And I had never met anybody Jewish until I was 18 years old, when I went to the University of California campus at Santa Cruz, and for the first time in my life I met somebody who said he was Jewish.

So, I don’t come to this issue with any particular hidden agenda, whether it’s Christian Zionists—that’s a new term that’s in use now—or as an advocate of Jewish Americans or Israelis. I do it for one reason. I support Israel for one reason: It is in the interest of my country, the United States.

Now, why would that be? I’ll give you one example. In 2012, ’13, and ’14, the United States embarked on a joint missile defense program with Poland and the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe. You know that because in 2012, that same year, then-President Barack Obama was caught on a hot mic right before his campaign that he was willing to be flexible on missile defense in Eastern Europe, i.e., give it up, if Russian President Vladimir Putin would give him space before his reelection. I.e., don’t invade Ukraine or don’t invade anybody, like you did in 2008 with Ossetia.

Both of them kept the bargain. Putin didn’t invade and for two years kept—and Obama was reelected and they removed missile defense.

But what was the missile defense for? It wasn’t to protect us, it couldn’t from Russia’s 7,000 nuclear-tipped missiles. It was designed to protect Europe from Iran. They were paranoid that, unlike us, they were in a range of new Iranian missiles, and Iran was considered hell-bent on getting a nuclear weapon. So, it was in our interest.

Forget Israel, forget anything else in the Cold War vis-a-vis the prior Cold War between Russia and the United States. It was in NATO’s interest to protect the European continent from whom? Iran. And that made sense, didn’t it? Because Iran had killed almost, if not more, Americans than ISIS had or al-Qaeda had.

Al-Qaeda was responsible, via Osama bin Laden, for 3,000 deaths on Sept. 11, 2001. But Iranian Shia terrorists all over the globe had killed Americans. They killed Americans in Beirut in the Marine barracks in the embassy. They gave shaped charges to our enemies in Iraq and probably were responsible for over 2,000 American soldiers dying or being maimed.

So, they were existential enemies of America, and we had taken efforts well aside from Israel to protect our allies and ourself from Iranians and that theocratic, anti-American government.

There was another reason too. We tend to often favor democratic or consensual societies over their antithesis. That’s why all of the NATO governments now are consensual, our closest ally. That’s why Australia—we are a close ally in New Zealand. They are consensual. That’s why we are closer to Canada than we are to Mexico, because it’s more consensual. That’s why we are good friends now with Japan. It’s a consensual government in a way it was not during World War II. We’re a consensual government. We see a consensual government in South Korea. OK.

So, what is Israel? Israel is a consensual government. It’s surrounded by 500 million people of the Islamic world—Shia and Sunni, Iranian and Arab—that aren’t, they’re not consensual.

There’s only one government that is truly a free democratic government, and that’s Israel. So, it has affinities with the United States and interest with the United States that transcends anything to do with the 7 million Americans who are Jewish Americans. That’s just a given.

They are not directing American policy. They couldn’t unless Israel was democratic, consensual, Western, an outpost in a dangerous part of the world that has key resources for global prosperity with oil and, more importantly, is an enemy of our existential enemy that transcends any question of Israeli or Iranian animosity, and that’s the theocratic government of Iran that began its existence by taking Americans hostage and storming our embassy.

There’s another question as well as we have all sorts of quasi-allies, of course, that are not consensual, and we give them a lot of money. We give Jordan over a billion dollars. We give Egypt over $600 million. We give a country that can be very, very anti-American all sorts of help, fellow Turkish member Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in Ankara. And we don’t require any prior litmus test that they be constitutional or consensual, but nobody seems to object to all the money we give these countries or all the support.

So, why would you not object for us offering military assistance to Turkey that isn’t consensual, fully, and still illegally occupies Northern Cyprus, but you would object to military assistance to Israel that is consensual and shares exactly the same enemies as the United States does? And these enemies are prior to and not relevant to Israel’s particular enemies. We would not be friendly with the Iranians, regardless of Israel. They took our embassy and they killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans for reasons other than we support Israel.

In other words, it’s in our self-interest to stop Iran from posing an existential threat to Europe, ourselves, from killing American soldiers, and for trying to disrupt and unsettle the entire Middle East, where 40% of the world’s oil is from. And that is well aside from the fact that Israel, the so-called Holy Land, is the foundation, the home, the birthplace of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That is a reason, but it’s not the only reason, it’s not even the primary reason, nor is the advocacy of Jewish Americans. The primary reason we support Israel: It’s in our cold, hard, self-interest.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/11/27/the-strategic-case-for-supporting-israel/

'The World According to JB Pritzker'

 No matter how familiar we become with the defamatory hyperbole of the Trump-haters, some of their utterances are disquieting. Few people are still startled by some of the attempted incitements to violence against the president and his followers of some of the racist African-American and Islamist Democratic members of the Congress, although their conduct and their utterances are disgraceful and shame the institution to which electors have mistakenly elevated them.

No one, though, could seriously be prepared for the governor of Illinois, the personification of inherited wealth, J.B. Pritzker, to make the portentous announcement to a national television audience that because of his association with the Illinois Holocaust Museum, he is an authority on the career and methods of Adolf Hitler and is perfectly qualified to attest to the similarity of the methods and ambitions of President Trump.

In the unlikely event that Mr. Pritzker does know anything about the Nazi era in German and European history, that makes his claim of a comparison between Hitler and Mr. Trump even more inexcusable than the usual flippant and ignorant references to Hitler as if he were merely an unusually nasty political leader.

For years, in their desperation and their ignorance, senior Democratic spokespersons have trivialized the monstrous crimes of Hitler and the fate of his many millions of innocent victims by reaching well into the consciousness of millions of Americans and bandying about the name of the man who was personally responsible for perhaps 50 million people who died in World War II, including more than 12 million who perished in conditions of unimaginable barbarity in the Nazi death camps.

Secretary Hillary Clinton played at it with an absurd comparison between Trump supporters raising their right hands with outstretched index fingers like sports fans proclaiming their team to be number one, and masses of Nazis giving the straight right arm “Sieg heil” salute to the Führer.

The former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who is long a champion of mind-bending exaggeration and who said that the Trump tax cuts of 2018 were “the worst disaster in the history of the world” and that President Biden was so distinguished a president that he “belonged on Mount Rushmore.” That was shortly before she helped sack him as the nominated presidential candidate of her party for rank incompetence). She has frequently compared Mr. Trump to Hitler.

The principal problem raised by these comparisons of a freely reelected American president with one of the most monstrously wicked people in all of history is that it indicates a dangerous ignorance of vital aspects of Western history. All of the Democratic politicians that I’ve mentioned are too well-informed not to know how false and slanderous these claims are. 

Yet they are obviously comfortable in the certainty that the great majority of the American public really has no idea of the extent of Hitler’s evildoing. The greatest utility of history as a subject is to give contemporary societies an insight into conduct and beliefs that are apt to be creditable and successful and those that are likely to be failures and sometimes shameful failures.

If the American public actually believes that any comparison between Hitler and Mr. Trump has the slightest applicability, that is convincing evidence of a dangerous level of ignorance of history in the United States. It was George Santayana who said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If contemporary Americans have no clear idea of who Hitler was and attach any credence at all to the notion that Mr. Trump resembles Hitler in any way other than that they are both masculine humans, then America is in much greater danger of being distracted and even misled by an authentic disciple of Hitler then it would if Americans were properly educated on the true proportions of Nazi evil and the proud role that America played with other nations in the defeat and destruction of Hitler.

It is similarly true that when atheism and anti-theism triumph completely in a society, and there is an oppressive and militant consensus that there are no spiritual forces, no divine intelligence, we are opening the way to the pagan elevation of men as presumptive deities. If there is nothing beyond what is perceptible and that every day we proceed toward a plenitude of knowledge, that susceptibility in the human psyche which has always been curious about spiritual forces and divine inspiration, is left to be impressed and ultimately transported by demonic heathenism as manifested in the Nuremberg rallies of Hitler and the May Day parades of Stalin.

The leader of France’s revolutionary Reign of Terror, Robespierre, produced a comparatively innocuous proto-festivity with his Festival of the Supreme Being on what is now the site of the Eiffel Tower. Genuinely great men who did not discourage their practical elevation to the status of demigods, such as Alexander the Great and Julius and Augustus Caesar, were talented and generally benign rulers but they incited a great deal of incompetent and often destructive imitation, including Caligula and Nero.

This is yet another area where the American teachers’ unions have allowed educational standards to collapse and created such a vacuum in the mind of the American populace that a controversial but constitutional president can be compared to the unspeakable murderer of scores of millions of innocents with apparent credulity. When the governor of Illinois, an educated man and former head of the Illinois Human Rights Commission, swaddles himself in his familiarity with the Holocaust and makes this comparison, he utters an evil calumny, shames himself and tarnishes the “Land of Lincoln.”

 Conrad Black is a Contributing Editor of the New York Sun.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/12/01/the_world_according_to_jb_pritzker_153584.html

German court may have just shattered one of the Biden era’s biggest lies

 It is often said that “the first casualty when war comes is truth.” A criminal warrant just issued in Germany shows that war continues to claim its victims. However, this warrant could prove to be as great an indictment not just of the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, but also of former President Joe Biden.

This week, a German court issued an arrest warrant for Ukrainian Serhii Kuznietsov, which may finally confirm what was long suspected: that Ukraine was responsible for the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in the waters near Denmark and Sweden.

The Biden administration may have been given prior warning. It was allegedly told years ago by a Ukrainian whistleblower that a six-person team of Ukrainian special forces was planning to rent a boat, dive to the sea floor and blow up the Nord Stream project. The operation was reportedly led by Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Nevertheless, after the attack, the Biden administration and many in the media fueled speculation that Russia had destroyed its own pipeline, despite evidence and logic to the contrary. It was another convenient claim of a Russian false-flag operation that allowed the Biden administration to ignore the possibility that Ukraine had not only engaged in environmental crimes but had also knowingly lied to its allies.

For years, some of us have questioned the official account from the Biden administration about the available evidence of those responsible.

The suggestion of a Russian attack on a Russian pipeline never seemed logical. However, the administration was funneling billions in support for Ukraine, funding that has now exceeds an estimated $180 billion. Having Ukraine sabotage pipelines to our allies would hardly be opportune when many were questioning the costs to U.S. citizens.

The Biden administration was not alone in running interference for Ukraine, as Zelensky denied responsibility despite mounting evidence to the contrary. When another alleged Ukrainian saboteur was found in Poland, a Polish court blocked the extradition to Germany and ordered his release. The reason? The judge did base the decision on Ukrainian denials. Instead, he declared that the act had been committed in the name of a just war. (Poland remains the frontline against Russian aggression in Europe).

An Italian court did not engage in such rationalization. It ordered the extradition of Kuznietsov, believed to be a key figure in the conspiracy. The attack involved leasing a yacht in the German port of Rostock, using forged IDs and a screen of intermediaries. Kuznietsov insists that he was an army captain serving in Ukraine at the time.

If the investigators are correct, it was not just the Ukrainian government that was lying to us. Biden was also presumably informed by the intelligence agencies of this evidence. Yet Biden kept suggesting anyway that the Russians were covering up the truth. He told the public, “The Russians are pumping out disinformation and lies. We will work with our allies to get to the bottom [of) precisely what happened] Just don’t listen to what Putin’s saying. What he’s saying we know is not true.”

Ironically, even if we were told about this evidence, the public might still have supported the commitment to Ukraine. After all, Ukraine is the victim of a horrendous invasion that has involved repeated charges of war crimes against the Russian forces. However, the public has a legitimate expectation that a country that is receiving billions in support will not engage in environmental attacks on our allies. These pipelines were in the economic zone of two NATO countries.

As the Germans work to find the truth, the question is whether the American public will ever be given transparency on our own government’s complicity or knowledge. The public was asked to pump billions into a war while the administration allegedly covered up an attack by Ukraine on a Western pipeline — and then may have misled the public.

The public also has a right to know if the CIA was told in advance that this attack was coming and either gave tacit approval or said nothing to our allies.

While Johnson is often quoted on his 1929 line about truth in war, the line following was equally poignant: “this mode of propaganda whereby … people become war hungry in their patriotism and are lied into a desire to fight. We have seen it in the past; it will happen again in the future.”

It may have happened in the U.S., and truth was not the only casualty. The American people were treated as chumps who could not handle the truth.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of the best-selling book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5625986-a-german-court-just-shattered-one-of-the-biden-eras-biggest-lies/

Trump rejected Maduro requests on call, options narrow for Venezuela leader, sources say

 Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro is running out of options to step down and leave his country under U.S.-guaranteed safe passage, following a short call with U.S. President Donald Trump last month where Trump refused a series of requests from the Venezuelan leader, according to four sources briefed on the call.

The call, on November 21, came after months of increasing U.S. pressure on Venezuela, including strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, repeated threats by Trump to extend military operations to land and the designation of Cartel de los Soles, a group the Trump administration says includes Maduro, as a foreign terrorist organization.

Maduro and his government have always denied all criminal accusations and say the U.S. is seeking regime change to take control of Venezuela's vast natural resources, including oil.

Maduro told Trump during the call he was willing to leave Venezuela provided he and his family members had full legal amnesty, including the removal of all U.S. sanctions and the end of a flagship case he faces before the International Criminal Court, three of the sources said.

He also requested removal of sanctions for over 100 Venezuelan government officials, many accused by the U.S. of human rights abuses, drug trafficking or corruption, according to the three people.

Maduro asked that Vice President Delcy Rodriguez run an interim government ahead of new elections, according to two of the sources.

Trump rejected most of his requests on the call, which lasted less than 15 minutes, but told Maduro he had a week to leave Venezuela for the destination of his choice alongside his family members.

That safe passage expired on Friday, prompting Trump to declare on Saturday that Venezuela's airspace was closed, two of the sources said.

The Miami Herald previously reported several details of the call. The Friday deadline had not been previously disclosed.

Trump on Sunday confirmed he had spoken with Maduro, without providing details. The White House declined to elaborate further, and Venezuela's information ministry, which handles all press inquiries for the government, did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

The Trump administration has said it does not recognize Maduro, in power since 2013, as Venezuela's legitimate president. He claimed a re-election victory last year in a national ballot that the U.S. and other Western governments dismissed as a sham and which independent observers said the opposition won overwhelmingly.

Speaking to marchers, Maduro on Monday swore "absolute loyalty" to the Venezuelan people.

It is unclear if Maduro can still make a fresh proposal involving safe passage. Trump held talks on Monday with top advisers to discuss the pressure campaign on Venezuela, among other topics, a senior U.S. official said.

A Washington-based source briefed on the Trump administration's internal discussions did not rule out the possibility of a negotiated exit for Maduro, but stressed that significant disagreements remained and important details were still unresolved.

The U.S. has raised a reward for information leading to Maduro's arrest to $50 million and has $25 million rewards out for other top government officials, including Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who have been indicted in the U.S. for alleged drug trafficking, among other crimes. All have denied the accusations.

Maduro's administration has requested another call with Trump, according to the three sources. 

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/trump-rejected-maduro-requests-on-call-options-narrow-for-venezuela-leader-sources-say