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LOGICMONITOR BLOG

The Cost of Ecommerce Downtime on Black Friday: Protecting Peak Season Revenue

A provider outage ten days before Black Friday 2025 showed how exposed peak-season revenue can be. Here’s what downtime costs, how to estimate your own number, and the questions to ask your teams before traffic arrives.

7–10 minutes
Denton Chikura

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Peak-season outages can put revenue at risk even when your own systems are healthy.

  • Holiday spending concentrates into a few weeks and peak hours, so disruption can hit when sales are highest.

  • Peak-hour revenue, incident duration, and the share of transactions affected show how quickly revenue at risk can add up; slow journeys and other costs add to the impact.

  • Provider outages and partial failures can disrupt checkout while basic checks or provider updates miss what customers are experiencing.

  • Before peak, ask teams to map critical journeys, set customer-impact thresholds, rehearse response and communications, and line up expert monitoring for the event window, such as Critical Event Coverage.

On November 18, 2025, with the holiday shopping season already underway and Black Friday just ten days away, Cloudflare’s network began failing to deliver traffic. For about three hours, visitors to sites that rely on it saw error pages where storefronts should have been, and it took almost six hours for all systems to return to normal. Cloudflare traced the problem to its own systems. It wasn’t an attack, and the retailers affected hadn’t caused it. But their customers still saw errors. Cloudflare described it as its worst outage since 2019. Our outage retrospective covers the incident in detail.

The timing is what leaders should take from it. Cloudflare’s outage struck as November’s holiday shopping traffic was building. Ten days later, U.S. shoppers spent a record $11.8 billion online in a single day. A failure at a provider you depend on can happen at any point in the year, but during peak shopping season, the same failure can cost much more.

This post looks at how peak season concentrates revenue, what downtime can cost, and how to estimate your own exposure. It explains why provider failures are hard to manage and what to ask your teams before traffic arrives. It also introduces Critical Event Coverage: LogicMonitor Professional Services experts set up and run focused digital experience monitoring of your critical customer journeys for an agreed event window.

How Much Revenue Peak Season Concentrates

The holiday season concentrates billions of dollars in online spending into just a few weeks. Adobe forecasts $275.1 billion in U.S. online holiday spending for November and December 2026, up 6.7% year over year. It expects Cyber Week, the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, to bring in $47.5 billion. That’s 17.3% of the season’s spending in five days. Black Friday alone is forecast at $12.9 billion, and Cyber Monday at $15.1 billion.

During those days, demand concentrates even more. On Black Friday 2025, shoppers spent $12.5 million per minute between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., according to Adobe. On Cyber Monday, the peak hours of 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. reached $16 million per minute.

Cyber Week captures a lot of holiday spending, but traffic rises well before the holiday weekend. Fastly found that Black Friday 2025 traffic on its network was only 10.8% above November’s daily average. The Cloudflare outage hit during that earlier stretch.

How shoppers arrive is also changing. Adobe expects mobile devices to account for 57.4% of online holiday spending this year, and traffic referred by AI assistants to rise 130%. Both shifts make this year’s traffic harder to predict from last year’s patterns. That concentration raises the stakes of even a brief outage during peak hours.

Adobe forecasts $275.1 billion in U.S. online holiday spending for November and December 2026, up 6.7% year over year.

What Downtime Costs

The Hidden Costs of Downtime 2026 reports on a survey of 2,000 executives at Global 2000 companies. It estimates that those companies lose an average of $300 million a year to unplanned outages and see an average 3.4% stock price drop after a single incident. The combined annual cost has risen 50% in two years. 

The same research attributes 43% of downtime events to network or IT environment issues, ahead of cybersecurity incidents at 32%. In the Internet Resilience Report 2025, 51% of organizations reported a negative economic impact of more than $1 million from incidents, up from 43% a year earlier.

Estimate Your Own Exposure

The figure that matters for planning is your own, and you can build a first estimate from data you already hold.

  • Find your revenue per minute during peak hours. Use last year’s busiest trading days, by hour.
  • Find how long incidents last. Take your typical time to detect and resolve a customer-facing incident from recent incident records.
  • Multiply the two, then adjust for the share of orders affected. The result is revenue exposed per incident. Some shoppers come back later, so treat it as a ceiling.


Example: If peak-hour revenue is $600,000, that is $10,000 per minute. If a checkout issue affects 40% of transactions for 20 minutes, the revenue exposed during the incident is:

$10,000 × 20 × 40% = $80,000

Even after cutting response time in half, $40,000 remains at risk. If your peak-hour sales are higher, your exposure is even higher.

The sales at risk are only part of the cost. An outage can also affect campaign spend, customer support, partner contracts, engineering time, and future purchases:

CostData to check 
Paid campaign spend during the disruptionAd platform spend and campaign timing
Extra customer supportSupport contacts during the incident and the cost of handling them
SLA or marketplace penaltiesSupplier and marketplace agreements, credits, or invoices
Engineering time diverted from planned workIncident records and time tracking
Shoppers who don’t returnRepeat purchase rate for customers who experienced an error, compared with those who didn’t

Provider failures are outside your control. Detection and response time are within it, and they’re the variable in that calculation you can improve before peak.

Slow Journeys Cost Sales Too

Slow performance reduces sales too. In Google and Deloitte’s Milliseconds Make Millions study of 37 brands and more than 30 million user sessions, a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed was associated with 8.4% more retail conversions and 9.2% higher spending per order.

Reliability teams treat it the same way. In the SRE Report 2026, most respondents said a performance degradation is as serious as downtime. In the Internet Resilience Report 2025, 42% of organizations said a slow application might as well be down. A checkout that takes too long during peak hours won’t appear on a status page, and it affects the same revenue.

Why Peak-Season Failures Are Hard to Manage

Last season’s incidents show three patterns. Each one has a consequence for the business as well as for engineering.

Your revenue depends on services you don’t run. A typical checkout relies on DNS, a CDN, edge security, cloud regions, identity and login providers, payment gateways, fraud and tax APIs, and third-party scripts. That reliance is widespread: 74% of organizations said third-party providers are highly or extremely critical to their resilience. When one of those services fails, your customers see the failure on your site, even if your own systems show no problem.

Partial failures can pass basic checks. During the Cloudflare outage, the faulty file was regenerated every five minutes from a database cluster that was being updated gradually, so the network recovered and failed repeatedly for a period. Cloudflare’s own engineers initially suspected an attack. On Cyber Monday 2025, Shopify kept checkout and storefronts online while some merchants temporarily lost access to admin tools, and the issue briefly reached point-of-sale logins. In both cases, a simple homepage availability check could have passed.

Provider reporting can trail during the incident. During Cloudflare’s November 18, 2025 outage, its status page also became unavailable, leaving affected businesses without a timely provider update. That’s why teams need monitoring and incident communications they can rely on independently, including a plan to keep customers, support teams, and executives informed as the incident unfolds.

Together, these patterns make peak-season incidents difficult to manage. Leaders need a clear view of customer impact to make timely decisions.

Six Questions to Ask Before Peak

These are the questions leaders should ask before peak season. Our accompanying practitioner guide covers how teams can answer them.

  • Which customer journeys carry our peak revenue, and what does each one depend on? Ask for a list of every service that search, product pages, cart, login, and checkout rely on, including the providers behind your providers.
  • How would we find out that a provider has failed? If the answer is the provider’s status page or customer complaints, detection is likely to be late.
  • Do we measure speed as closely as availability? Ask whether alerts cover how long key journeys take to complete, and whether you have a baseline from before the season to compare against.
  • Have we rehearsed a failure, and who makes the call and communicates? Ask when failover was last tested, who can shift traffic, pause a campaign, or switch off a non-essential feature, and who coordinates updates for customers, customer support, and executives. Agree on the owners and prepare any messages before the event.
  • Who is watching during peak hours? Peak days fall over a holiday period. Ask who is on shift, how experienced they are, and what happens when an incident runs past a shift change.
  • What will we report to the business afterward? In the SRE Report 2026, 47% of respondents named aligning reliability with business KPIs or customer experience as their top priority for the year ahead. Agree before the season which measures you’ll report, so the review is ready when the season ends.

How Critical Event Coverage Supports Your Peak

Those answers should shape your monitoring plan. Critical Event Coverage gives you a dedicated LogicMonitor Professional Services team that identifies the external services and digital experience dependencies behind your most important customer journeys, configures monitoring around them, and watches them 24/7 during the agreed event window.

  • Before the event: The team works with you to select your critical journeys, the paths customers take to find, choose, and buy. It identifies the external services and digital experience dependencies affecting each one, then configures LogicMonitor Digital Experience tests, dashboards, alerts, and escalation routes for your approval.
  • During the agreed coverage window: A dedicated team validates alerts, triages issues, and escalates to your team with diagnostic evidence.
  • After the event: You receive a post-event analysis with recommended actions for your next peak period, to inform your business review and the next round of preparation.


SAP used the service to cover more than 2,000 websites through Black Friday: 

LogicMonitor’s Professional Services is a very agile team that extends great value through 24×7 proactive monitoring of our 2000+ websites. This team of experts share detailed information during an issue, reduce false alarms and provide deep insights into performance of our websites that has helped us identify gaps and improve end user experience. LogicMonitor and its Professional Services team have played a key role in achieving zero downtime across all our websites during Black Friday.”

Martin Norato Auer Vice President of CX Observability and Automation Foundations, SAP 

A typical engagement provides 24/7 coverage for a two-week window around your event. Enroll at least a month ahead so there is time to map owners and set up the agreed monitoring.

Conclusion

Cloudflare’s November 2025 outage arrived during the busiest shopping period of the year. The exposure it revealed is the same this year: a large share of online revenue arrives in a few days, through services you don’t run. Leaders who know their own number, ask the six questions above, and arrange experienced coverage before the season are in a stronger position to protect that revenue.

Get expert coverage for your next peak.

Critical Event Coverage combines LogicMonitor Digital Experience with Professional Services support. During your agreed event window, a 24/7 team validates alerts, triages issues, and shares diagnostic evidence. Afterward, you receive post-event analysis with recommended next steps.

By Denton Chikura

Technical Writer

Denton Chikura is a technical writer and longtime observability advocate focused on helping site reliability engineers and engineering teams discover the tools and capabilities that strengthen internet resilience. He works at the intersection of monitoring, performance, and infrastructure to make complex systems more understandable and usable, bridging the gap between deep technical detail and real‑world operations. His goal is to help teams build faster, detect issues earlier, and recover smarter, ultimately making the internet a better, more reliable place for everyone.

Disclaimer: The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of LogicMonitor or its affiliates.

© LogicMonitor 2026 | All rights reserved. | All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

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