From Black Friday through Cyber Monday (BFCM), Stripe processed more than 300 million transactions with a total payment volume of more than $18.6 billion. It was the largest ever four-day period on Stripe. A Stripe public microsite tracked these and a dozen other BFCM metrics in real-time, including the uptime of the Stripe API. During this period of intense activity, the Stripe API maintained availability greater than 99.999%, with a peak of 27,395 requests per second.

The term Black Friday was coined in Philadelphia in the 1960s, to characterize the way physical infrastructure struggled under heightened volume as crowds surged downtown at the start of the Christmas season. The way people shop has changed a lot since then. Today, nearly half of all shopping around the weekend after Thanksgiving takes place online, which is why since 2005, the period has been known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But the holiday spending spree is still an infrastructure test—though now of digital financial infrastructure as much as physical roads and stores.

This BFCM, Stripe handled a peak volume of 93,304 transactions per minute, while maintaining API uptime greater than 99.999%. This level of reliability ensured that large companies such as Amazon, Shopify, Lightspeed, and Squarespace maximized their revenue potential during the most active shopping days of the year.

"Black Friday-Cyber Monday is the busiest moment of the year for Shopify merchants, and Stripe's industry-leading uptime and performance helped ensure millions of successful transactions," said Farhan Thawar, VP of engineering at Shopify.

While BFCM originated in the US, it’s gone global. Over the past weekend, Stripe processed more than one billion each in GBP, EUR, CAD, and AUD denominated transactions, and facilitated purchases in 185 countries. The top cross-currency purchasing routes were Americans buying from Canadian merchants and British consumers shopping with businesses in the eurozone.

“Black Friday can be a really stressful, high-pressure period for us,” said Edward Whatmore, chief digital officer at Mountain Warehouse, a UK-based company and one of the world's largest sellers of outdoors equipment. “To have a stable platform with a high rate of uptime is key, so fortunately we were able to switch to Stripe and push all of our traffic through the platform. With Stripe, we don't have to worry about reliability. We can rest easy knowing our platform is going to have greater than 99.999% uptime.”

“Every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are must-attend events for us, as ecommerce professionals,” said Jean-Cédric Costa, CIO at La Redoute, the French home designer and fashion curator. “We always see a spike in purchases across all countries we operate in. Having a reliable payments partner like Stripe is key to managing these massive volumes, and we are very happy with the enterprise support we get from them.”

BFCM transaction volume on Stripe has increased more than 300x over the last ten years. The Stripe BFCM dashboard tracked the record-setting volume in real-time, along with metrics for a range of Stripe products. In total, during BFCM:

• More than 5.4 million subscriptions were created with Stripe Billing. That’s more than one subscription for every citizen in Ireland, and means that many businesses on Stripe will benefit from recurring subscription revenue long after BFCM is over.
• More than 250,000 Stripe Climate contributions were made. These donations will directly support carbon removal from the atmosphere.
• More than 530,000 minutes (equal to more than a full year) of checkout time was saved with Link, Stripe’s one-click checkout.
• Over 16.7 million fraudulent transaction attempts were prevented with Stripe Radar.

“As our customers respond to the surge in consumer demand, we’re fixated on continuously improving reliability,” said David Singleton, chief technology officer at Stripe. “Peak days like Black Friday give us a glimpse into what an average day on Stripe will look like soon. Stripe is already prepared to handle the much larger volumes our customers will need from us as their businesses grow.”