Black Friday Cyber Monday Traffic Operations

5/5/2026

This post details KIKO Milano's migration to Vercel, highlighting their previous manual scaling process on AWS EC2 for Black Friday and the subsequent improvements after adopting Vercel. Key benefits include eliminating manual infrastructure prep, reducing app build times by 75% (from 20 minutes to under 4 minutes), and enabling multiple daily deployments. The post emphasizes Vercel's automatic scaling capabilities, separating static delivery, cached pages, and dynamic compute for independent scaling during traffic spikes, which removed performance variability and operational tax for KIKO.

12/2/2025

This post details the operational performance of Vercel's platform during the Black Friday-Cyber Monday 2025 peak traffic period. It quantifies the scale of requests, deployments, AI Gateway usage, Fluid compute invocations, cache hits, ISR reads/writes, firewall actions, bot blocking, and human verification. It emphasizes the platform's automatic adaptation to traffic patterns and its ability to maintain consistent performance without manual intervention. Specific metrics and their implications for AI-native shopping, dynamic workloads, content freshness, and security are highlighted.

10/15/2025

This post details Vercel's performance and resilience during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025, highlighting the platform's ability to handle massive traffic surges. It quantifies the scale of requests processed (86.7 billion), peak requests per second (1.9 million), and deployments (2.4 million). It emphasizes the effectiveness of the multi-layered firewall (3.5 billion blocks), including platform firewall for DDoS and WAF for business logic. Techniques like background revalidation and request collapsing are explained for maintaining origin stability and user experience. The post also details the observability features, including real-time dashboards, custom queries, anomaly alerts, and unified signal streams via Drains, to monitor performance and availability during peak load.

12/24/2024

This post details the technical implementation of the Black Friday-Cyber Monday live dashboard. It covers the dashboard's Next.js architecture with a modified polling approach, backend optimizations using rolling windows for queries and Upstash KV for cumulative counts, and frontend optimizations with Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) for caching and `requestAnimationFrame` for dynamic number animations. It also touches on accuracy measures for preventing over/undercounting.

12/3/2024

This post details Vercel's performance and operational metrics during Black Friday-Cyber Monday 2024, highlighting the handling of 86.7 billion requests, 1.9 million peak requests per second, and 2.4 million deployments. It emphasizes the platform's ability to scale dynamically, mitigate DDoS attacks (1.75M+ per second), and invoke a large number of functions (28.9B+). Specific features like function failover regions, auto-scaling concurrency, Routing Middleware, ISR, framework-defined infrastructure, instant rollbacks, and the Vercel WAF are highlighted for their role in ensuring reliability and security during peak traffic. The post also notes an 80% growth in peak requests per second compared to BFCM 2023.

11/27/2024

This post details a specific customer's successful migration from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Vercel, highlighting the business impact of improved performance, scalability, and reduced technical debt. It quantifies the benefits with metrics such as a 33% increase in average orders per minute, a 5x increase in conversion rate at peak, a $10 million revenue increase, and a 500ms reduction in TTFB. The migration strategy involved a phased approach and A/B testing, leading to accelerated deployment of key e-commerce pages. The post also touches upon Vercel's role in enabling personalized user experiences through Functions and Middleware, and the benefits of a headless architecture.

2/21/2024

This post details Vercel's multi-layered approach to frontend resiliency, emphasizing high availability and global performance during massive traffic spikes. It explains how optimized global routing directs users to the nearest edge and primary regions, with seamless rerouting during network component outages. It also covers highly available compute resources, including multi-AZ deployment for Vercel Functions and the option for Function Failover to a backup region for protection against full regional downtimes. The post further elaborates on using Edge Config for simplified backend failover protection, enabling quick rerouting of compute to backup systems like databases or headless e-commerce platforms during outages.

9/29/2022

This post details how basement.studio used Vercel to build and scale MrBeast's storefront, handling unprecedented traffic volumes. It highlights the use of Vercel for fast iteration, reliable scaling during peak traffic, and setting a platform record for site requests. The technical implementation involved server-side game logic using Shopify's Admin API for discount codes and a type-safe connection to Shopify's Storefront API via a custom library (react-dropify). Observability was managed with Axiom.