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Betting on Black Friday Bedlam

Michelle McLean

Every year, multiple retailers duke it out for worst outage of the online holiday shopping season. This year, as companies are prepping for the Black Friday traffic onslaught, we thought it would be fun to get ahead of the game, asking folks now about failures they anticipate next November.

To learn more, ScaleArc ran a quick "Christmas in May" survey, asking which retailers people expect to be impacted. It turns out that the majority of Americans (52 percent) do indeed expect that a top retailer will have an online meltdown during this fall's holiday shopping season.

Walmart took the top prize on the list of retailers expected to have a major outage this holiday season. Here's how some of the big retailers stack up:

■ Walmart – 23 percent

■ Best Buy – 17 percent

■ Macy's – 16 percent

■ Target – 16 percent

■ Amazon – 14 percent

■ Costco – 7 percent

And disgruntled shoppers won't go quietly into that good night – more than half said they take an action:

■ Leave the website – 26 percent

■ Visit a competitor's website – 21 percent

So often the database is the culprit – it's the hardest part of the technology stack to scale, and even when it's got resiliency built in, it's hard to enable apps to leverage that automatic failover.

Now's the time to make sure your IT team is taking all the steps they can to avoid downtime during the Black Friday onslaught.

Michelle McLean is VP of Marketing at ScaleArc.

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Betting on Black Friday Bedlam

Michelle McLean

Every year, multiple retailers duke it out for worst outage of the online holiday shopping season. This year, as companies are prepping for the Black Friday traffic onslaught, we thought it would be fun to get ahead of the game, asking folks now about failures they anticipate next November.

To learn more, ScaleArc ran a quick "Christmas in May" survey, asking which retailers people expect to be impacted. It turns out that the majority of Americans (52 percent) do indeed expect that a top retailer will have an online meltdown during this fall's holiday shopping season.

Walmart took the top prize on the list of retailers expected to have a major outage this holiday season. Here's how some of the big retailers stack up:

■ Walmart – 23 percent

■ Best Buy – 17 percent

■ Macy's – 16 percent

■ Target – 16 percent

■ Amazon – 14 percent

■ Costco – 7 percent

And disgruntled shoppers won't go quietly into that good night – more than half said they take an action:

■ Leave the website – 26 percent

■ Visit a competitor's website – 21 percent

So often the database is the culprit – it's the hardest part of the technology stack to scale, and even when it's got resiliency built in, it's hard to enable apps to leverage that automatic failover.

Now's the time to make sure your IT team is taking all the steps they can to avoid downtime during the Black Friday onslaught.

Michelle McLean is VP of Marketing at ScaleArc.

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...