Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the busiest shopping events of the year. Retailers eagerly prepare for this peak sales period, expecting to drive significant revenue through door-busting deals and massive online sales and promotions. However, with great opportunity comes great risk. Among the most critical risks facing retailers and shoppers during Black Friday sales are the threat of website and other related IT outages and cybersecurity concerns.
In today’s digital-first world, a few minutes of downtime can lead to significant financial losses, tarnished brand reputation, and lost customer trust. For this reason, understanding the cost of holiday season outages is essential for retailers looking to safeguard their operations. Curious about how downtime might affect your business? Use our downtime calculator to see how much data loss could compound your issues and hurt your bottom line.
The Cyber Threat Landscape
The CrowdStrike eCrime Index (ECX), included in its 2024 Global Threat Report, provides insights into the evolving trends of cybercrime, measuring key activities like spam emails, network access prices, and the number of ransomware victims. The chart comparing 2022 and 2023 shows significant growth in the ECX, particularly in the second half of 2023. Notably, the index spiked in November 2023, driven by a rise in spam emails and the increasing costs for malicious tools like loaders and stealers.
This November spike is especially relevant to Black Friday, which cybercriminals often target. As companies experience higher traffic and transactions during this period, the surge in spam emails and malicious software costs may reflect increased attempts by cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities, especially around high-value shopping events. Organizations should be extra vigilant during these times to safeguard against potential cyberattacks.
Access brokers are also a growing threat in the cybercrime landscape. These actors specialize in acquiring unauthorized access to organizations’ networks and selling that access to other cybercriminals. This service enables ransomware groups and other malicious actors to bypass the initial stages of attacks, accelerating their efforts to breach organizations. In 2023, access broker activity surged, with nearly 3,000 advertisements for compromised access. November saw the highest level of activity, with 450 advertisements alone, indicating a significant uptick in cybercriminal operations during this time.
The Real Cost of IT Outages During Peak Shopping Periods
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become synonymous with increased in-store and online traffic. While retailers work hard to ensure website performance and user experience are up to par, it’s hard to anticipate the sheer volume of website traffic for certain sales items once the clock strikes midnight or when sales start early on Thanksgiving Day.
For e-commerce and omnichannel retailers, this spike in activity places tremendous pressure on their IT infrastructure. Any disruption, from a power blackout, server failure, or a cybersecurity attack can result in catastrophic losses. In 2021, it was estimated that IT outages cost retailers $4.5 million per hour in lost sales, depending on the size and scale of the business. Retailers can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute during unexpected downtime.
To minimize the impact of potential outages during critical periods, Lightedge offers advanced disaster recovery, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), and both managed and unmanaged backup solutions that ensure your systems are always operational, even when faced with the unexpected. With our geographically distributed data centers, failover capabilities, and real-time data replication, we provide the infrastructure that allows retailers to recover from disruptions in a fraction of the time.
The Hidden Costs of Black Friday Website Outages
Beyond the immediate financial losses, Black Friday website outages can also have profound indirect costs, such as:
- Customer Trust and Brand Reputation – Consumers have little patience for downtime. A negative experience during a peak shopping period like Black Friday can lead to a significant loss of trust, with customers unlikely to return to a retailer that failed to deliver a seamless experience.
- Recovery and Mitigation Expenses – After an outage, retailers often need to spend additional resources to investigate the root cause, fix vulnerabilities, and improve their infrastructure. These recovery costs can add up, putting additional strain on a retailer’s bottom line.
- Lost Future Sales and Customer Churn – The inability to deliver a consistent and reliable shopping experience can result in lost future sales. Customers are quick to move to competitors and a single outage can lead to a ripple effect of lost business opportunities.
Proactive Protection
Our cloud-based backup systems and managed services provide businesses with continuous, automated protection. This means that even in the event of an outage, your business can restore critical data and resume operations with minimal delay. Lightedge’s dedicated monitoring teams are also on call 24/7 to proactively address any emerging issues and ensure your systems are always secure and performing at peak levels.
Moreover, with end-to-end encryption and multi-layered security protocols, your data is protected from cyberattacks and malicious threats—key concerns during peak sales events when online traffic spikes. Lightedge’s compliance certifications, such as ISO 27001, SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS, further ensure that your IT infrastructure is aligned with industry standards, giving you confidence that your business is fully protected and operational.
Preventing IT Downtime
At Lightedge, we don’t just react to outages—we help prevent them through strategic planning, proactive monitoring, and business defense strategy solutions. By implementing a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, businesses can ensure redundancy and failover, preventing the risks associated with overloading a single data center or cloud infrastructure. This means your website, customer transactions, and back-end systems stay online, even under the most extreme traffic loads.
Contact Lightedge today to learn more about how Lightedge’s resilient and reliable IT solutions can help you maintain business operations, even under extreme conditions.
