3× Load, Zero Excuses: The Real Engineering Test Called Black Friday

And behind all the excitement: the discounts, the crowded carts, the “buy now before it’s gone” energy, there’s something most people never see: months of intense engineering work.

In 2024, U.S. consumers spent over $10.8 billion online in a single day, and many retailers saw traffic surges of 2–3× their normal volume. At peak moments, some platforms handled thousands of checkouts per minute.

While everyone else is enjoying the deals and the festive mood, engineering and SRE teams are in full focus mode, making sure everything stays up and running. Every second of uptime matters, and recent studies show that even a one-second slowdown can meaningfully reduce conversion rates. Under peak traffic, those small drops add up fast.

I remember this vividly from my time leading a major part of an e-commerce platform for a global home-appliance brand. Our team didn’t start preparing in November. We started in August.

Months of deep work went into:
• Scaling the platform
• Validating resilience
• Running load and spike tests
• Conducting tabletop exercises for operational stability
• Aligning engineering and SRE support for rehearsals and the main event

There is no luck in Black Friday resilience.
Only preparation, discipline, and the collective focus of a team determined to deliver every single customer experience flawlessly.

So as the world enjoys another year of holiday deals, take a moment to appreciate the teams who keep the digital lights on. Their work is what makes the magic possible.