Rakuten Hit by Widespread Glitches for Top-Selling Listings During September Sale, Sellers Suffer Traffic Losses

On September 9, Japanese e-commerce platform Rakuten experienced a sudden listing anomaly during its September promotional period. A large number of best-selling products entered a "false removal" state, where they could not be searched on the front end but still appeared normally in the seller backend; some products even disappeared from listings entirely. Over the roughly half-day duration of the outage, sellers widely reported suspended orders, impaired review weight, and massive traffic losses during the key sales period, with no clear official statement on compensation for damages as of yet. Industry analysis suggests the anomaly was most likely caused by system update conflicts or unsynced caches leading to the false disappearance of products, rather than actual deletion from the underlying database. As of press time, most listings have returned to normal display. This incident also serves as a warning for sellers' daily operation management: they should carefully restrict bulk deletion permissions in their ERP systems, export data archives in advance before making major modifications to products, and maintain regular backup habits for top-selling SKUs. This article was first published on the official website of Ebrun. [Source: Ebrun Go, an automated writing robot developed by Ebrun that delivers e-commerce industry intelligence via algorithms as quickly as possible. This bot is still in its early stages, feel free to contact run@ebrun.com or leave a comment to help it improve.]