Black Friday is one of the best days for retailers, manufacturer and logistics companies. In 2024, “Cyber Week drove $314.9 billions in global online sales, with Black Friday alone accounting for $74.4 billion.” According to Salesforce. For European retailers, the stakes are just as high in any other region around the world. According to Euronews, “Germans, Austrians, and the French are expected to spend the most on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with sales predicted to be boosted by an average of 175%. With an average budget of €251, Germans are the biggest spenders during this period, followed by the Austrians, with €219 and the French with €206.”
This may sound great to the finance department, but the IT department must make sure their infrastructure can handle the surge of shopping. Without the right tools and partners, many IT departments at retailers, manufacturers, logistics companies pray their website hold up and hope they get through the day with minimal downtime. After all, “During high-demand events, downtime is one of the most expensive risks in digital operations. Industry studies show that the average cost of downtime exceeds USD 300,000 per hour. Furthermore, during peak retail events like Black Friday, total downtime losses across the industry can reach as high as USD 675 million.” According to IBM.
The hidden risks behind Black Friday
When millions of customers flood your website in a span of 24 hours, the pressure on IT systems skyrockets. Here are the most common and costly issues:
• Website crashes & slow checkouts: High traffic can overwhelm servers, causing timeouts, 500 errors, and broken payment gateways.
• Inventory sync failures: Without proper tools that oversee all of your inventory in real time, you risk overselling which leads to cancellations, refunds, angry customers, and reputational damage.
• Support team overload: Thousands of alerts flood during peak hours, drowning IT teams in noise and slowing down response times. This can be from being unable to pay, being unable to view a specific page.
• Security threat: Cybercriminals use credential stuffing to test out stolen username/password combination on retail sites.
• Payment gateway failures: Payment APIs often time out under heavy load, causing transaction failures and lost revenue. During Black Friday, the fear of missing out causes people to buy the same or similar product on a different website.
How to prevent these Black Friday IT disasters
Dynatrace
Dynatrace ensures your digital services stay resilient under extreme load such as Black Friday by providing full-stack observability and AI-powered root cause analysis. Its OneAgent automatically captures logs, metrics, and traces on your applications, infrastructures and microservices. All of this telemetry flows into Grail, Dynatrace’s unified data lakehouse, which smartly stores everything with context so your team can see the entire environment in real time. Grail eliminates data silos, enabling Davis AI to apply causal analysis across all layers and pinpoint the exact root cause and impacted components.
For example, if Mastercard transactions fail while Visa transactions works, Dynatrace detects the anomaly instantly, correlates it with backend dependencies and alerts your team with actionable insights. Dynatrace Smartscape automatically discovers, maps, and visualizes the topology of your entire technology stack from end-user applications all the way down to the underlying infrastructure so you get a clear image of how the failure in the Mastercard situation affects what and who in real time.
Automai
One month before Black Friday, amasol can implement Automai into your IT infrastructure to test how it would handle the surge of traffic. Automai uses robotic automation to perform code-free, front-end synthetic load testing by simulating thousands of real user interactions across any application or business process to identify performance bottlenecks.
If you are expecting 50,000 users, amasol can design and implement a test with 50,000 users with the help of Automai and we will instruct the program to click on everything on the website. Let’s say after 20,000 users, the checkout page begins to slow, your IT team can scale or add extra servers, optimize load balancers, and fine-tune payment gateways. Automai acts as validation of your critical workflow ensuring nothing breaks when customers rush to buy. By running these stress tests early, you avoid costly surprise of downtime during the most profitable day of the year.
BigPanda
During the day, there will be a lot of alerts popping up everywhere such as slow checkouts, inventory sync errors, and payment API timeouts. Without structure, this alert storm becomes noise which will overwhelm your support team while customers grow in frustration at the slow rate of resolution. BigPanda solves this with their AI-powered correlation engine called Biggy, which automatically aggregates and enrich alerts from all your monitoring tools, grouping them into actionable incidents with context like root cause and impacted services.
For example, if your payment gateway starts timing out, BigPanda doesn’t show you 500 scattered alerts, it correlates them into one incident, linking the root cause which could be the overloaded API server with all affected services such as checkout, order confirmation, and refunds. This means your team sees one clear picture instead of hundreds of fragmented signals. With a clearer image, you resolve the problem faster and not overwhelm your support team on the most profitable day of the year.
CrowdStrike
Black Friday is also a profitable day for cybercriminals. Credential stuffing attacks spike as hackers test stolen username/password combinations on retail websites. CrowdStrike Falcon provides real-time threat detection and prevention, stopping these attacks before they compromise sensitive data.
For example, if attackers launch a botnet to brute force login during peak traffic, Falcon’s behavioral analytics and machine learning detect anomalies instantly such as hundreds of failed login attempts from a single IP. It then blocks the malicious activity and isolates affected endpoints, preventing account takeover and protecting sensitive data.
Why you need amasol
These are all amasol’s technology partners and their solutions are powerful but buying them all without a strategy can lead to tool overload, wasted budget, and poor implementation. Many companies end up with dashboards they don’t understand. Alerts they can’t prioritize. Data that doesn’t translate into action. This results in further complexity rather than clarity.
amasol is a vendor-neutral managed service provider. That means we’re not tied to a single product or platform. Instead, we evaluate your specific challenges and recommend the most effective solution from our ecosystem of trusted partners. Unlike individual vendors who naturally advocate for their own tools, amasol provides objective guidance based on what will actually solve your problem.
amasol & BizOps
At amasol, we understand that budgets are tight and every technology investment must deliver measurable value. That’s why we embrace BizOps, short for Business Operations. A mindset that connects IT performance directly to business outcomes. amasol believes in:
• Aligning technology decisions with measurable business results.
• Bridging the gap between IT operations and financial KPIs.
• Confirming that all IT investments deliver value.
If you are a company that rely on Black Friday to boost your revenue, it’s time to proactively devise a strategy rather than hope and pray everything will work out on one of the most profitable days in the year. Contact us today for an initial non-obligatory first contact and see how amasol could help your company become proactive rather than reactive.
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