Despite a challenging year, the 2020 Cyber Week broke records with consumers spending $9.03 billion on Black Friday, and $10.8 billion on Cyber Monday. While leading brands like Costco avoided last year\u2019s well-publicized downtime, several global brands, including Currys, Etsy, Ulta Beauty, and Naked Wines, fell victim to outages due to demand.<\/p>\n
It was both our busiest and quietest weekend.<\/p>\n
It was our busiest because we delivered 100% availability for all our customers, for the seventh consecutive year, while serving 86% more online shoppers than last year, and blocking hundreds of millions of security threats!<\/strong><\/p>\n
Ecommerce stores, powered by Webscale<\/a>, were able to:<\/strong><\/p>\n
With that said, it was also one of our quietest weekends because unlike traditional Magento hosting providers, Webscale leverages powerful automation throughout its technology stack, ensuring that any actions that need to be taken are done so according to established workflows and web controls, vs error-prone, manual process. We also worked closely with customers on Application Load Testing<\/strong>, to help them understand how their storefront would perform under significant load. It ensured they would know how their store would handle large amounts of simultaneous checkouts and whether there were any architecture or code dependencies that could impact the site\u2019s ability to deliver. You can learn more about our unique approach to load testing in our datasheet<\/a> or our recent blog<\/a> on the subject.<\/p>\n
As we look beyond the holidays into 2021, we see security remaining a top priority. While data on cyber attacks and their financial impact on the industry during the Cyber Week period is still rolling in, one leading industry report says Cyber Week 2020 saw large increases in both the total number of DDoS attacks (65% more than 2019) and the number of customers attacked (up 57% from 2019). Not surprising given that the FBI has already reported a 400% increase in cyber crimes this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n
As we have learned, having a great Cyber Week boils down to 4 simple rules<\/p>\n
We\u2019d like to congratulate the thousands of Magento storefronts on the Webscale platform on their success and, as always, we look forward to scaling with them as their business grows in the years to come.<\/p>\n
Like every human on the planet, I will be glad to say goodbye to 2020 and, with the pending roll out of a successful COVID-19 vaccine, I look forward to returning to some semblance of normality, eventually. But, I also realize that it\u2019s potentially been one of the most important years in the history of ecommerce, with a decade\u2019s worth of growth coming in just a handful of months. It\u2019s an incredible foundation that has pushed merchants harder than ever before and that can only mean great things are coming in 2021, on all fronts.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d like to learn more about how Webscale can prepare your ecommerce storefront for major sales events, drop us a line at sales@webscale.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"