Posted by
Ken Godskind
on
Monday, November 28, 2011
The online holiday shopping season forged forward this weekend with little incident (stay tuned for further updates). Top retailers continued to deliver the strong website performance they displayed on Thanksgiving night, even improving slightly on Black Friday. Across-the-board response times for Friday were approximately 2 percent faster than on Thursday, an improvement that corresponds with Akamai's retail traffic data. Akamai recorded peak traffic on Black Friday of approximately 1.7 billion page views per minute, down slightly from a peak of 2 billion on Thursday.
The graph below shows Thursday to Friday response time comparisons (in seconds) for each of the 50 retail websites in our monitors.
A quick note: While overall performance was stronger on Black Friday than Thanksgiving Thursday, two different sites did experience a few errors. For two 20 minute periods during the 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. EST time frame, Victoria's Secret was temporarily unavailable. The Gap also displayed a few timeout messages around noon EST.