Black Friday Sinks Leading Nordic E-Commerce Sites
November 30, 2015
Share this

E-shoppers rushed to the leading Nordic e-commerce sites when Black Friday started at midnight, forcing several of them to crash. The huge interest in good online deals led to leading e-commerce sites like Elgiganten, Siba, NetOnNet, Dustin and Zalando becoming unavailable for trade immediately after midnight, according to Apica. The websites immediately and intermittently went down and at times were completely impossible to use.

Big events such as Black Friday often lead extreme traffic peaks caused by a large number of potential customers trying to shop at the same e-commerce site, all at the same time.

“This event demonstrates the importance of proactive capacity planning and load testing on various traffic levels, even higher that you think would be attainable,” said Sven Hammar, CEO of Apica. “Communication / IT managers for e-commerce sites must be well prepared for peak loads, in particular during occasions like these that can be predicted well in advance and expected to generate a lot of traffic. E-traders lose lots of money when customers cannot enter the shop or reach the cashier.”

Apica measured response times and uptime for several of the leading e-commerce sites when Black Friday started.

“Downtime in connection with peak loads often depends on the underlying systems not scaling all components and with one component, e.g. login or purchase transaction, causing the entire site to crash or render itself unusable. Proper load tests can identify potential problems before customers are affected – and before e-traders start losing money”, concludes Hammar.

Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2024

Nearly all (99%) globa IT decision makers, regardless of region or industry, recognize generative AI's (GenAI) transformative potential to influence change within their organizations, according to The Elastic Generative AI Report ...

March 27, 2024

Agent-based approaches to real user monitoring (RUM) simply do not work. If you are pitched to install an "agent" in your mobile or web environments, you should run for the hills ...

March 26, 2024

The world is now all about end-users. This paradigm of focusing on the end-user was simply not true a few years ago, as backend metrics generally revolved around uptime, SLAs, latency, and the like. DevOps teams always pitched and presented the metrics they thought were the most correlated to the end-user experience. But let's be blunt: Unless there was an egregious fire, the correlated metrics were super loose or entirely false ...

March 25, 2024

This year, New Relic published the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance Report to share insights derived from the 2023 Observability Forecast on the adoption and business value of observability across the financial services industry (FSI) and insurance sectors. Here are seven key takeaways from the report ...

March 22, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and AIOps ...

March 21, 2024

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value ...

March 20, 2024

Today, as enterprises transcend into a new era of work, surpassing the revolution, they must shift their focus and strategies to thrive in this environment. Here are five key areas that organizations should prioritize to strengthen their foundation and steer themselves through the ever-changing digital world ...

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...