It’s the most wonderful time of the year…for eCommerce businesses.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2026 (the full five-day period is known as the Cyber Five) are fast approaching.
And so, unfortunately, are some very costly website crashes…
What is Black Friday?
Black Friday is an online (and offline) shopping event in which retailers apply massive discounts.
Technically, Black Friday will fall on the 27th of November in 2026, but many retailers will start the Black Friday deals even earlier.
What are Cyber Monday and the Cyber 5?
Same deal (pardon the pun), except Cyber Monday, which will fall on the 30th of November this year, focuses on online bargains and savings.
The Cyber 5 runs between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
Why do Black Friday and Cyber Monday cause website crashes and poor performance?
Quite simply, it’s the sheer amount of traffic.
In 2025, Black Friday online sales grew to $79 billion, with sales in the US alone growing by 3%.
As high streets, malls and bazaars give up the ghost, website transactions are fast outstripping cash passed from hand to hand.
The downside for online retailers is that without proper scaling and support in place, frenzied shoppers will be met with outages, downtime and poor performance – all at an eye-watering cost.
What’s the impact of website crashes and slowdowns over the Cyber Five?
What’s the impact of website crashes and slowdowns over the Cyber Five?
With the average cost of downtime sitting around $14,000 a minute, and that number rising to as high as $23,750 for large enterprises, we wouldn’t want to calculate what 5, 10 or even 15 minutes of downtime could mean at the busiest time of year.
In 2025, even electronics giant Best Buy was caught lacking, with more than 1,600 users reporting the site was slow or not loading in the middle of Black Friday.
So, when it comes to shoring up your site over the Cyber Five, our advice would be to test before the traffic arrives.
How to stop your website crashing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday
CDN (content delivery network)
A CDN (content delivery network) is a network of servers placed across the globe.
CDNs serve static content from whichever node is closest to the user, cutting down on latency and taking the pressure off elsewhere.
CDNs are used by the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Facebook to improve user experience and guard against crashes in the event of a traffic surge.
They also lead to better performance and less slowdown.
Scalable infrastructure
While most online retailers will be using some form of cloud infrastructure, calling them truly scalable might be a bit of a stretch…
Serverless computing is an increasingly popular way of gaining extra scalability, but there are many other solution architecture decisions that can add up to a more robustly scalable site.
Other best practices include refactoring your application to microservices, implementing API-first design and containerisation.
If you’re on AWS, Lambda and Fargate are services worth checking out. For Azure, AKS is the go-to serverless option. And Google Cloud users can have a gander at GKE.
Stress testing
We’re big fans of stress testing here at Just After Midnight, as it’s one of the best ways to mitigate nasty surprises.
A stress test means simulating traffic to your website until it either fails or until the performance drops below an acceptable level.
This is important not only so you can test your site against predicted conditions, but so you can see how it deals with failure. This means better disaster recovery planning and less downtime overall.
Host/support service level agreement (SLA)
An SLA details things like annual downtime allowed by hosting providers or the minutes to response and resolution from your support team.
A good provider will be able to deliver a speedy response and recovery – which is a must-have for high-traffic, high-revenue conditions like the Cyber 5.
It might be worth having a chat with your provider to see if you can improve your stats over busy periods. Take a look at our support SLAs for a truly superlative example.
24/7 full-stack support
A full-stack support provider – like yours truly – can cover your entire stack, from the eCommerce application layer to the infra and any third-party integrations.
Over the years, we’ve kept pace with innovations like composable commerce, Jamstack and cloud-native eCommerce, so we’re in a better position than most to keep the lights on over Black Friday and the Cyber Five.
Find out more about how our pioneering full-stack support can prevent website crashes in time for the big event.
Brands hit hard by website crashes on Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Shopify
On Cyber Monday 2025, thousands of Shopify merchants were locked out of their admin and point-of-sale systems in a daylong outage, and Shopify’s share price ended the day down 5.9%. Shopify said online storefronts and checkout stayed up. But merchants couldn’t manage orders or take payments in store. Your site is only as resilient as the platform underneath it.
Chemist Warehouse
On Black Friday 2024, Australian pharmacy retailer Chemist Warehouse’s website crashed under demand for discounted perfume. Shoppers were placed in a virtual queue with an estimated 58-minute wait. One reporter who got through after about 25 minutes was sent straight back to the queue when they clicked through to the home page. Rivals including JB Hi-Fi, Kmart and Amazon Australia stayed up.
Boots
In November 2024, Boots’ website and app repeatedly crashed during the run-up to its ‘biggest ever’ Black Friday sale. The site reportedly went down for around 30 minutes, though some customers complained of problems for hours. Boots put the cause down to ‘extremely high demand’.
Harvey Norman
Most recently, Australian online retailer Harvey Norman may have lost as much as 60% of online sales during 2023’s Black Friday.
This comes following the retailer’s reported antipathy to investing in online infrastructure.
Nike
The aforementioned titans of sportswear fashion saw a calamitous Black Friday 2022, with users stuck at the payment page or having their carts emptied at the final hurdle.
While no official figures have been released, it’s safe to guess this outage will have cost the prettiest of pennies.
Everyone else
This year alone – 70.4% of US shoppers have abandoned a purchase because of a slow or glitchy website.
How we can help in 2026
As a cloud-native MSP specialising in 24/7 full-stack support – and with a focus on mission-critical apps – we really can say we’re the go-to partner when it comes to crunch-time events like the Cyber Five. Plus, our managed services for eCommerce are perfectly adapted to meet the demands of ever-evolving eCommerce architectures.
To find out how we can get you shipshape for November 27th – or for anything else – just get in touch.
