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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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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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