Just another (Black) Friday
By Steven Van ·
Vercel says it served 86.7 billion requests last Black Friday to Cyber Monday, peaking at 1.9 million requests per second.
Vercel published a rundown of how its infrastructure held up over last year's Black Friday to Cyber Monday window, as a guide for teams preparing for this year's peak on Vercel. Across the roughly four-day stretch, the platform served 86,702,974,965 requests, peaking at 1,937,097 requests per second, and customers kept shipping code throughout, with 2,454,917 deployments during the same window.
Helly Hansen, a technical apparel brand, moved from client-heavy rendering to Vercel's CDN before the event and saw an 80% year-over-year revenue increase, 2x higher conversion, zero downtime, and Core Web Vitals shift from red to green.
Vercel also detailed the defenses and caching behaviour that run by default during traffic spikes:
- The platform Firewall triggered 3,052,195,860 request blocks last year, filtering DDoS traffic at the network perimeter, while customer-specific Web Application Firewalls blocked 519,841,270 requests and can be configured around routes like checkout, login, or API endpoints.
- BotID provides invisible CAPTCHA-level protection that distinguishes real users from automated agents without added friction.
- Background revalidation regenerates stale pages behind the scenes so users still get a fast response, and request collapsing merges duplicate requests hitting an uncached or expired route into a single regeneration per region.
- The Observability dashboard covers cache hit/miss rates, traffic by region and path, function invocation counts and latency, upstream error rates, and real-user metrics; anomaly alerts are available in public beta for Pro and Enterprise plans, and Drains can stream logs, traces, and analytics into existing tools.
Vercel is also running a Black Friday Cyber Monday readiness webinar with a best-practices checklist and a free site readiness assessment tool, and offers a tailored readiness plan through its sales team. Read the full announcement.
