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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.

Image removed.

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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.

Image removed.

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Cloud migration is a highly strategic decision that involves leadership sponsorship, business justifications for moving to the cloud, and a clear understanding of expected value. Lack of this alignment can be the reigning cause of cost and budget overruns and why almost half of the migration efforts underway today will fail in the next three years ...

One of the most misunderstood culprits of poor application performance is packet loss. Even minimal packet loss can cripple the throughput of a high-speed connection, making enterprise applications sluggish and frustrating for remote employee ... So, what's going wrong? And why does adding more bandwidth fail to fix the issue? ...

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Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

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The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

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