How to Mitigate Outages on Black Friday Next Year

Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring massive savings for shoppers, but also sleepless nights for engineering and operations teams as they battle incidents. Retailers experience varying degrees of outages during this period, with the most significant impact occurring between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday. High traffic is one reason for these issues, but other factors include overburdened APIs, slow third-party technology integrations, sites heavy with graphics, or a failure to look at regional performance levels. Feature management can help retailers prepare for potential issues during peak shopping days by utilizing feature flags. This approach allows teams to quickly disable non-essential features and manage traffic spikes effectively.