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Picture this: It's Thanksgiving 2019.
While families across America are carving turkey and arguing about politics, Costco's IT team is living their worst nightmare. Their website is down. Completely. For 16 agonizing hours.
The damage? A staggering $10.9 million in lost sales.
And here's the kicker, it happens way more than you’d expect:
- In 2017, Nike's website went down on Black Friday, with customers unable to check out and receiving error messages.
- The following year, J.Crew's website crashed for over five hours, potentially losing $775,000 in sales according to LovetheSales.com.
- Lowe’s also suffered a website crash on Black Friday 2018, forcing them to shut down temporarily and relaunch later in the day. CEO Marvin Ellison later revealed the culprit: their entire ecommerce infrastructure was a decade old.
Many businesses are unprepared for Black Friday 2025. This article will help you spot weaknesses in your business so you can fix them now, before they cost you this holiday season.
Why do Black Friday crashes keep happening?
Every year, major retailers go down during Black Friday, and it’s often not due to a one-in-a-million event. It’s because they’re unprepared for the scale, complexity, and velocity of what’s coming.
Here’s what still goes wrong, and how to do it better.
1. Underestimating peak traffic (by a lot)
Many companies test for two to three times the normal traffic.
Sounds reasonable, right?
However, Black Friday can bring 10-25x normal traffic spikes. Most load tests don’t model real-world spikes or buyer behavior, leaving critical systems overwhelmed when it matters most.
What to do instead: Use production-grade simulations that reflect live checkout usage, including mobile-heavy behavior and high-volume bursts.
2. Deploying last-minute code or features
Black Friday is not the time to launch new flows, rebrand pages, or test “one small change.” Even minor updates can trigger cascading failures when pushed to scale.
Yet companies do it every year, thinking they're adding "improvements" that end up breaking under load.
What to do instead: Lock down changes at least two weeks before peak and enforce a deployment freeze unless it’s a critical fix.
3. Inadequate load testing
Simulating 1,000 concurrent users in staging won’t prepare you for 100,000 real customers with JavaScript-heavy carts, mobile devices, and multiple payment options.
Real load testing means simulating actual user behavior at a massive scale, not just pinging your servers.
What to do instead: Test at scale with a focus on your checkout path, not just homepage pings.
4. Single points of failure
One database. One payment processor. One anything = one massive problem.
When one of these goes down, everything does. No redundancy means no resilience.
What to do instead: Build in redundancy. Solutions like Checkout by Sticky.io offer multi-gateway routing and cascading, helping you stay live even if a payment processor fails.
5. Assuming auto-scaling will save you
Having auto-scaling isn't enough.
If it's not configured properly, your servers won't spin up fast enough to handle the surge. By the time they do, customers will have abandoned your checkout.
According to PwC research, 32% of customers will abandon a brand they love after just one bad experience. In the U.S., 59% will walk away after several bad experiences. And nearly half of customers who have a negative experience will tell their family and friends about it.
What to do instead: Pre-warm infrastructure, monitor latency thresholds, and build triggers for earlier scale-up events.
How much revenue is your checkout losing right now?
Use our calculator to find out exactly how much abandonment is costing you, and what you could recover with a faster, optimized experience.
Try adjusting your abandonment rate to see the impact on your bottom line.
6. Overlooking third-party dependencies
Your core site might be solid, but what about your reviews widget? That social media integration? That analytics tool?
These third-party dependencies can cause failures that take down your entire operation.
What to do instead: Before Black Friday, audit every third-party script and build fallbacks or degradations for non-core functionality.
7. The hidden checkout bottleneck
Even if your homepage and PDPs stay fast, your checkout can become the choke point.
Most checkout systems weren't built for Black Friday — or traffic surges in general. They time out under pressure, struggle with mixed carts, or worse, accept orders they can’t fulfill.
What to do instead: Opt for a checkout solution that’s fast-loading, has flexible payment routing, and high uptime. Platforms like Sticky Checkout:
- Seamlessly integrate with Shopify
- Connect to 160+ payment gateways
- Deliver 59% faster load times than other hosted checkouts
- Offer 99.999% uptime
Your Black Friday survival guide
Black Friday is the ultimate stress test for your ecommerce infrastructure. To survive — and thrive — you need to prepare every layer of your customer experience, from mobile speed to checkout flexibility.
Below are four key areas that make or break your performance when the holiday pressure’s on.
Optimize your mobile experience
Mobile drove 70% of Black Friday purchases in 2024.
Shoppers expect your mobile site to have checkout flows built for speed, clarity, and payment flexibility. If your mobile checkout isn't optimized, you're losing customers with every tap.
The solution? Rethink the entire experience:
- Single-page checkouts
- One-click payments
- Mobile-first design
If you’re not ready for mobile-first traffic surges, you’re not ready for Black Friday.
Make your infrastructure resilient
Test for at least 3x normal traffic.
Better yet? Go for 10x. Yes, it may feel like overkill if you haven’t seen that much traffic during past Black Friday sales. But you won't regret it when your site's still standing while competitors struggle or go dark.
You need:
- Auto-scaling that actually works
- Content delivery networks (CDNs)
- Load balancers that won't buckle
- A disaster recovery plan (that you've actually tested)
Optimize your checkout experience
Your checkout process is probably slowing you down.
Make it simple:
- One-click checkout for returning customers
- Guest checkout (non-negotiable)
- BNPL and every major payment method
- Load times under two seconds
Make Black Friday “Black November”
Black Friday isn’t a day or a weekend anymore. It’s a season.
Amazon runs 12-day Black Friday events now, and others are following suit. In 2024, 63% of retailers extended their Black Friday campaigns.
Why? Because it works. In more ways than one.
The National Retail Federation found that 85% of consumers had started their holiday shopping before Thanksgiving. Last year, 38% shoppers took advantage of sales specifically the week before Black Friday, up from 35% in 2023.
Not only do customers want to shop before Black Friday, but starting your holiday sales earlier in November can help keep your site from being overwhelmed. Spreading demand across "Black November":
- Prevents server overloads
- Improves customer experience
- And gives you more chances to optimize performance and maximize sales
Be built for Black Friday, not broken by it
When every second counts and every click could be a conversion, your checkout isn’t just a page — it’s your biggest revenue lever. The winners on Black Friday know that.
That's where Checkout by Sticky.io comes in.
Sticky.io’s Checkout platform is built for Black Friday scale. It delivers:
- Lightning-fast load times, up to 59% faster than other hosted checkouts
- Seamless Shopify integration
- Access to 160+ payment gateways
- Enterprise-grade reliability with 99.999% uptime
- Built-in tools to increase average order value (upsells, order bumps, mixed-cart logic)
Sticky.io Checkout is built for speed, scale, and serious conversions — everything you need to win Black Friday.
Try it free and see how fast your checkout can be.
