During high-traffic, online sales peaks like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks spike in both frequency and intensity. Attackers know the stakes are higher. And that any outage, even a momentary one, can cause major disruption – and lost opportunities for sales.
While not every outage is officially attributed to a DDoS event, the signs of increased threat activity were impossible to ignore during Black Friday 2024:
- Cloudflare reported that over 6% of HTTP requests to shopping and retail websites during Cyber Week 2024 were blocked as potential DDoS traffic – a massive volume considering global retail traffic during that period.
- Darktrace observed a 692% surge in Black Friday-themed phishing and related cyberattacks in November 2024, reflecting how malicious actors aggressively target retail infrastructure around peak sales events.
- Costco’s website crashed on Black Friday 2024, with more than 700 outage reports as shoppers tried to access limited-time deals. While the exact cause wasn’t disclosed, it illustrates how fragile online infrastructure can become under peak loads.
These examples highlight the increased risk of downtime during the peak shopping season.
Companies Face Numerous Challenges in High-Traffic Periods
Beyond direct attacks, the sheer volume of legitimate user traffic during peak shopping periods places extraordinary strain on infrastructure. Systems that perform well under normal loads may begin to falter when faced with thousands of concurrent sessions, real-time inventory checks, and payment processing requests.
Many organizations operate with legacy configurations, limited scalability, or incomplete visibility across cloud, CDN, and edge environments – all of which increase the risk. The added pressure of coordinated promotions, flash sales, and third-party integrations further increases the potential for failure, especially when compounded by targeted DDoS activity and exploitation of overlooked vulnerabilities.
The problem isn’t “just” stopping DDoS attacks. It’s about ensuring the entire digital ecosystem can perform reliably under pressure.
Validate Your DDoS Defenses – Before Attackers Do
Most organizations conduct DDoS testing once a year or less and rely on default settings in their DDoS mitigation tools, assuming they’ll hold up under pressure. But during high-volume events like Black Friday, those assumptions are rarely tested – until it’s too late. Here’s where things go wrong:
- Misconfigured burst limits can allow attacks to overwhelm gateways.
- Unmonitored endpoints create blind spots attackers can exploit.
- Assumed protection from cloud providers may not apply to application-layer or multi-vector attacks.
- Limited validation of DDoS protection solutions means teams are flying blind.
Reduce DDoS Vulnerability. Improve Resilience.
Attackers often combine volumetric floods (targeting bandwidth and network devices) with application-layer attacks (targeting APIs, login endpoints, and payment pages). The result: legitimate users can’t access services – even if the site appears online.
Most DDoS solutions can mitigate these threats – but only if properly configured and continuously validated.
How Leading Enterprises Eliminate DDoS Downtime Risks
As DDoS attacks become more complex, more frequent, and increasingly fueled by AI, they’re harder than ever to predict – and even harder to stop reactively. That’s why continuous DDoS testing is now essential. By continuously simulating real-world attacks and validating DDoS protection solutions, organizations can:
- Stay ahead of evolving threats
- Fine-tune configurations before traffic spikes
- Ensure all security layers and vendors are aligned
- Build true DDoS resilience
Get Ready with Real-Time DDoS Visibility
To prepare for the peak retail shopping season:
- Audit your DDoS protection setup proactively. Don’t assume it’s working – test it.
- Check if your DDoS mitigation tools are handling Layers 3, 4 and 7 traffic (and not just volumetric floods).
- Coordinate across teams and vendors, so that you know who’s responsible for what during an incident.
- Simulate DDoS attack conditions before an attack begins.
DDoS Attacks Don’t Take Holidays
Black Friday isn’t just a shopping day – it’s an infrastructure stress test. For e-commerce, finance, and digital platforms, the weeks around Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent peak risk. Web traffic surges, attackers get bolder, and seconds of downtime can mean millions lost.
If you haven’t tested your DDoS protections in a real-world, high-traffic scenario, peak season isn’t the moment to find out where the DDoS misconfigurations and vulnerabilities are. Take action ahead of time, before the traffic surges.
Want to learn more about how to eliminate damaging DDoS downtime? Speak with an expert!
Skim Summary
DDoS attacks spike during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, targeting the increased web traffic and revenue stakes. In 2024, major retailers faced blocked traffic, phishing surges, and even site crashes.
Many organizations wrongly assume their DDoS protections will hold – until they fail under real pressure. Misconfigurations, unmonitored endpoints, and insufficient testing are common gaps.
To stay protected, companies need to:
- Test protections before peak traffic
- Ensure coverage across Layers 3, 4, and 7
- Simulate real-world attack scenarios
- Coordinate incident response ahead of time
Black Friday is not the time to find out your DDoS defenses are weak. Prepare now with continuous DDoS testing and validation.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. Why do DDoS attacks spike around Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
These are peak times for online retailers and digital platforms. Attackers know that any downtime can result in large financial losses and reputational damage.
2. How are DDoS attacks different during peak shopping periods?
Attacks tend to be larger, more complex, and more targeted. They often combine high-volume network floods with application-layer and API-based attacks.
3. Isn’t my cloud provider already protecting me?
Not necessarily. Cloud providers often cover basic volumetric attacks but may not protect against complex, multi-layered DDoS threats. Many organizations mistakenly assume full coverage.
4. What is continuous DDoS testing?
It is the practice of continuously simulating realistic DDoS attacks to test and validate the effectiveness of your DDoS defenses without disrupting the live production environment.
5. Isn’t my existing DDoS solution enough?
Not if it hasn’t been tested. Many tools are misconfigured or outdated. Without validation, there is no way to know if they will hold up under real attack conditions.
6. What layers should DDoS protection address?
Robust DDoS protection must handle:
- Layer 3 and 4 attacks, which target the network and transport layers.
- Layer 7 attacks, which target application logic and APIs.
7. How can I prepare for Black Friday?
- Audit your current DDoS defenses.
- Simulate attack scenarios before traffic surges.
- Confirm that DDoS protections address all relevant threat layers.
- Coordinate roles and responsibilities across teams and vendors.
8. How can MazeBolt help?
MazeBolt offers continuous, nondisruptive DDoS testing across your full attack surface. This helps eliminate DDoS misconfigurations and blind spots before attackers can exploit them.
