Shopify was hit with an outage on Cyber Monday, leaving some businesses unable to manage transactions during one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

In an update to its status page, the Canadian e-commerce company said select merchants were experiencing issues logging into Shopify, while others were unable to access point-of-sale systems, a critical portal used to manage transactions and other backend processes.

Later in the day, Shopify said its services were beginning to recover, but that some merchants may still observe some disruptions to its POS and Admins tools.

“We have found and fixed an issue with our login authentication flow, and are seeing signs of recovery for admin and POS login issues now,” the company said in an update at 2:31 p.m. EST. “We are continuing to monitor recovery.”

A Shopify spokesperson pointed CNBC to its status page when reached for comment.

The Downdetector website showed thousands of users reporting problems with Shopify around 1:15 p.m. EST, after roughly 4,000 cases were reported by users at its peak at 11:00 a.m. EST.

Shopify sells software for merchants who run online businesses as well as services such as advertising and payment processing tools.

Shopify says it handles more than 10% of all e-commerce transactions in the U.S.

The company made its name as a platform for small businesses and direct-to-consumer brands, but it increasingly hosts online storefronts for larger retailers like Reebok, Mattel, Barnes & Noble and Nestle.

The outage coincided with the Cyber Monday discount bonanza, when holiday shoppers rushed to snap up discounted products.

Adobe Analytics estimates that U.S. shoppers will spend $14.2 billion online Monday, up 6.3% from a year earlier.

American shoppers spent $11.8 billion on Black Friday, marking a 9.1% jump from last year, according to Adobe.

OpenAI on Monday announced it is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, a company that was launched by one of its major investors, Thrive Capital, in April.

The startup said it will embed engineering, research and product teams within Thrive Holdings’ companies to help accelerate their AI adoption and boost cost efficiency.

Thrive Holdings buys, owns and runs companies that it believes could benefit from technologies like artificial intelligence. It operates in sectors that are “core to the real economy,” starting with accounting and IT services, according to its website.

OpenAI, which is valued at $500 billion, did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.

“We are excited to extend our partnership with OpenAI to embed their frontier models, products, and services into sectors we believe have tremendous potential to benefit from technological innovation and adoption,” Joshua Kushner, CEO and founder of Thrive Capital and Thrive Holdings, said in a statement.

It’s the latest example of OpenAI’s circular dealmaking.

In recent months, the company has taken stakes in infrastructure partners like Advanced Micro Devices and CoreWeave.

The partnership is structured in a way that aligns the incentives of OpenAI and Thrive Holdings long term, according to a person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named because the details are private.

If Thrive Holdings’ companies succeed, the size of OpenAI’s stake will grow.  

It also acts as a way for OpenAI to get compensated for its services, according to another person familiar with the agreement who declined to be named because the details are confidential.

“This partnership with Thrive Holdings is about demonstrating what’s possible when frontier AI research and deployment are rapidly deployed across entire organizations to revolutionize how businesses work and engage with customers,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said in a statement.

OpenAI also announced a collaboration with the consulting firm Accenture on Monday.

The startup said its business offering, ChatGPT Enterprise, will roll out to “tens of thousands” of Accenture employees.

WATCH: OpenAI taps Foxconn to build AI hardware in the U.S.

Artificial intelligence startup Runway on Monday announced Gen 4.5, a new video model that outperforms similar models from Google and OpenAI in an independent benchmark.

Gen 4.5 allows users to generate high-definition videos based on written prompts that describe the motion and action they want. Runway said the model is good at understanding physics, human motion, camera movements and cause and effect.

The model holds the No. 1 spot on the Video Arena leaderboard, which is maintained by the independent AI benchmarking and analysis company Artificial Analysis. To determine the text-to-video model rankings, people compare two different model outputs and vote for their favorite without knowing which companies are behind them.

Google’s Veo 3 model holds second place on the leaderboard, and OpenAI’s Sora 2 Pro model is in seventh place.  

“We managed to out-compete trillion-dollar companies with a team of 100 people,” Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told CNBC in an interview. “You can get to frontiers just by being extremely focused and diligent.”

Runway was founded in 2018 and earned a spot on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list this year. It conducts AI research and builds video and world models, which are models that are trained on video and observational data to better reflect how the physical world works.

The startup’s customers include media organizations, studios, brands, designers, creatives and students. Its valuation has swelled to $3.55 billion, according to PitchBook.

Valenzuela said Gen 4.5 was codenamed “David” in a nod to the biblical story of David and Goliath. The model was “an overnight success that took like seven years,” he said. 

“It does feel like a very interesting moment in time where the era of efficiency and research is upon us,” Valenzuela said. “[We’re] excited to be able to make sure that AI is not monopolized by two or three companies.” 

Gen 4.5 is rolling out gradually, but it will be available to all of Runway’s customers by the end of the week. Valenzuela said it’s the first of several major releases that the company has in store.

“It will be available through Runway’s platform, its application programming interface and through some of the company’s partners,” he said.

WATCH: We tested OpenAI’s Sora 2 AI-video app to find out why Hollywood is worried