Why was my Just Eat restaurant taken offline when the kitchen is open?

Restaurant operators on Just Eat meet the strictest published trigger in this category, and it costs a single order. Just Eat states that an order not acknowledged within five minutes is rejected automatically, and then says what happens next: “If you do miss the order and it is rejected, your restaurant will be taken offline under the assumption that you are closed or too busy to accept incoming orders.” One unanswered order on the Orderpad, while the kitchen carries on cooking, and the storefront is off.

Can one missed order take a Just Eat restaurant offline?

Yes, and Just Eat publishes both halves of the rule in the same answer. On the acceptance window: “If you fail to acknowledge an order within 5 minutes it will be automatically rejected.” On the consequence: “If you do miss the order and it is rejected, your restaurant will be taken offline under the assumption that you are closed or too busy to accept incoming orders.” Source: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk.

Notice the reasoning Just Eat gives for its own behaviour. It is not framed as a penalty. The platform infers from the silence that the restaurant is shut, and acts on the inference. That is a sensible default for a corner shop with one device and a disaster for a busy kitchen where the tablet is three metres away from anyone with a free hand.

There is no threshold to stay under, no run of failures required and no warning period. Compare the neighbouring platforms and the difference in tolerance is stark. Deliveroo closes a site only after “three auto-rejections within 15 consecutive minutes”, a reason its partner API documents by name. Uber Eats pauses after “Multiple orders in a row that go unaccepted”. Just Eat needs one.

The same page also names a separate cost for the other failure mode, accepting an order and then cancelling it: “Please note that if the order is older than 5 minutes, we would ask you to cover 50% of the order value to compensate the customer.” So the five minute mark matters twice, once for silence and once for a change of mind.

What does “You went offline until tomorrow” mean, and when do you come back?

It means the storefront is off and Just Eat will restore it by itself the following day. The Partner Hub route for a short closure is documented as three steps, with a note attached: “(Please note, this feature automatically puts you back online the next day.)” The control is described as “Toggle the ‘Taking orders’ slider to change your status”, and the confirmation is a popup reading “You went offline until tomorrow”. Coming back sooner is the same toggle in reverse, confirmed with a popup reading “You’re back online”. Source: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk.

Automatic restoration the next day is a real protection, and it is also why these outages go unexamined. Nobody investigates a problem that is gone by morning. The evening it happened is simply missing from the sales figures, and the branch that lost it has no record that anything occurred.

Going offline for longer than that is not self service at all, and the route to it is a support request rather than a control. That distinction is set out with the rest of the return on our page about how to get Just Eat to put your restaurant back online, because it belongs to planning a closure rather than to explaining one that already happened.

Can Just Eat take a restaurant offline for reasons other than orders?

Yes, and the second route has nothing to do with the kitchen’s conduct on the night. On food hygiene Just Eat states that “Restaurant Partners with an FSA 0 are no longer allowed to trade on Just Eat until their FSA rating has improved to a 1 or above.” Source: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk. The same compliance section also covers restaurants taken offline over trademark issues, which is a platform side action with no operational cause inside the restaurant at all.

Notice what those two share and where they part company. Both are decided outside the branch and neither is announced to the person standing in it. But a missed order removes the restaurant for one evening, while a rating or a trademark removes it until a third party has done something, and the wait for that third party is not Just Eat’s to shorten. The route out of a compliance offline is set out separately on our page about getting a Just Eat restaurant back online.

For a chain the practical point is that all three look identical from head office. A branch missing because nobody touched the Orderpad, a branch missing on a hygiene rating and a branch missing on a trademark produce the same empty space in the app, and only the first of them will be gone by tomorrow morning.

What is the difference between going offline and closing for the day on Just Eat?

Going offline is a live switch on the Partner Hub home screen, described above, with automatic restoration the next day. Closing for the day is part of the opening hours editor, and Just Eat describes it as a checkbox: “When managing your opening and closing hours you also have the opportunity to close your restaurant for the day by ticking the relevant box.” The article adds a warning that reads like it was written after several incidents, telling partners to double check before saving to avoid mistakes.

The difference decides who can undo it and when. The slider is a state the platform will clear for you overnight, so the worst case is one evening. A tick against a date is an instruction the platform will carry out faithfully, so the worst case is however many dates were ticked. A restaurant reported as offline for a fortnight has almost never been switched off fifteen times, it has been given a date range once.

The device on the counter is called the Orderpad, and it is the surface where the five minute clock actually runs. Anything that stops the Orderpad from being answered, a flat battery, a dropped connection, a member of staff who took it into the kitchen, feeds directly into the rule at the top of this page. That is why a restaurant can be fully staffed, fully stocked and taken off the app inside five minutes, without a single person in the building making a decision.

How do you catch a Just Eat restaurant that was taken offline?

By looking at the storefront, because Partner Hub is a poor witness here for a structural reason rather than a design one. It reports what is true now, and the automatic restoration guarantees that what is true now is fine. The evidence of a missed order and the evidence of nothing at all are the same evidence by breakfast, which is why these outages are argued about rather than counted.

What settles the argument is the moment the listing stopped being orderable and the moment it started again, taken from outside the account and set against the hours that restaurant published for that day. Two intervals a week apart at the same site, starting at the same point of the evening, describe a shift rather than a coincidence, and a shift can be changed. That record is what Kitchain (kitchain.co) builds by reading the Just Eat storefront the way a customer does.

One correction worth making to how these get reported internally. A branch does not decide to go offline on Just Eat in the ordinary case, so asking who switched it off produces a denial and a dead end. The question that produces an answer is what was happening to the Orderpad at that minute. Background on the platform itself is at kitchain.co/aggregators/just-eat/.