Target customers began reporting problems accessing the retailer’s website and mobile app Friday morning, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, in what appeared to be a developing disruption affecting the company’s digital shopping platforms.

Downdetector said user reports indicating problems with Target began climbing at 10:03 a.m. Eastern time. The tracking service posted about the rising number of reports on its official account on the social platform X, asking affected users to describe how the outage was impacting them and tagging the post with the hashtag “TargetDown.”

As of Friday morning, Target had not issued a detailed public statement addressing the scope, cause or expected resolution timeline for the reported disruption. Separate outage-monitoring services showed a mixed picture of the retailer’s status around the same period. One tracker, WebsiteDown, reported that its automated probe found Target’s website reachable and responding normally, while noting that any issues appeared to have already cleared by the time of its check. Another service, Outage.now, similarly indicated it had not detected any outages affecting Target over the preceding 24 hours as of Friday, though it remained unclear whether that data reflected conditions before or after the wave of reports Downdetector flagged at 10:03 a.m.

Target does not maintain a widely publicized, continuously updated public status page of its own for customer-facing outages, meaning shoppers and outside observers typically rely on Downdetector and similar third-party monitoring tools, along with the company’s official social media accounts, to gauge the scope of a disruption before Target issues any direct acknowledgment.

Friday’s reported issue would not be the first time Target’s digital platforms have experienced problems. In December 2025, the retailer’s website and app suffered a significant outage that began generating elevated Downdetector reports shortly after 6 a.m. Eastern time and continued disrupting customers throughout the day, landing just days before Christmas during the peak holiday shopping period. At the time, a Target spokesperson acknowledged the issue directly in a statement, saying, “We’re aware of intermittent issues with our digital experience and a fix is underway,” while noting that the company’s physical stores remained open and ready for holiday shoppers. Target also posted updates to its official X account during that earlier incident, telling affected customers at one point that the company’s systems were “temporarily down” and advising them to try their transactions again within one to two hours.

Target’s digital and point-of-sale systems have experienced other significant disruptions in past years as well. In one earlier incident, the company experienced a global point-of-sale outage that left many stores able to accept only cash and gift cards, with checkout systems down for more than two hours on the first day and continuing to cause problems into a second consecutive day. Following that episode, Target confirmed the disruption was not connected to any data breach or security incident, telling customers that no guest information had been compromised, and attributing the outage instead to an internal technology issue without disclosing further specifics.

Target operates one of the largest e-commerce and retail platforms in the United States, with its website and app supporting product browsing, checkout, order tracking, and in-store pickup scheduling for millions of customers. According to monitoring services that track the retailer’s digital infrastructure, outages affecting Target’s online systems have historically tended to spike around high-traffic shopping periods, including the release of the company’s weekly promotional deals, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when checkout systems face significantly elevated transaction volumes.

For customers experiencing ongoing issues Friday, standard troubleshooting guidance compiled by outage-tracking services recommended several basic steps, including forcing a full browser refresh, clearing browser cache and cookies, trying an alternate web browser, and disabling browser extensions that could potentially be interfering with the site’s normal functionality. Customers were also advised to check Target’s official social media accounts for any outage-related announcements and to contact the company’s customer support team directly through the app’s help section for issues specifically related to existing orders.

Given the discrepancy between Downdetector’s report of rising complaints beginning at 10:03 a.m. and other monitoring tools showing no detected issues around the same general timeframe, the true scope and duration of Friday’s disruption remained difficult to independently confirm using publicly available tracking data alone. Some outage reports affecting large retailers can reflect brief, localized or quickly resolved technical issues that do not register clearly across every third-party monitoring service, particularly when a problem affects only a specific subset of site functionality, such as checkout or order tracking, rather than the platform as a whole.

This remains a developing situation, and additional details regarding the precise scope, underlying cause and resolution timeline of Friday’s reported Target outage were not immediately available. The company had not issued an official public acknowledgment of the disruption as of Friday morning, leaving affected customers largely reliant on Downdetector and Target’s own customer service channels to determine whether their individual access problems were part of a broader, platform-wide issue.