Black Friday is Dead, Long Live Black Fridays: Cyber 5 Traffic Insights

Black Friday, as we knew it, is dead.

Or at least the idea of a single frenzied day of online shopping spikes has quietly disappeared. For years, Black Friday was the moment that the internet braced for – the day brands stress-tested their infrastructure, the day shoppers set alarms, and the day that traffic graphs suddenly turned into mountains.

Based on traffic patterns across Fastly’s Commerce customer base, which includes some of the largest retailers in the world, Black Friday as a singular, exceptional spike is no longer the defining feature of holiday ecommerce. Instead, we’re seeing a more subtle, distributed pattern that stretches far beyond a single day.

Here’s what the encompassing weekend known as Cyber 5 looked like in 2025, how it differs from previous years, and what engineering teams should consider when they plan for future peak seasons.

What is Cyber 5?

Before we dive in, let’s do a quick refresher on Cyber 5. It refers to the 5-day stretch from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, a critical revenue window for retailers, and long considered the pressure test for ecommerce infrastructure.

But 2025 continued a trend that we’ve seen build for years: Cyber 5 is no longer an outlier. Instead, it blends into a much longer, more sustained traffic season spanning all of November.

What Fastly Saw During Cyber 5 2025

Even as global participation in Cyber 5 increases, purchasing power still orbits around U.S. consumer behavior and sales schedules. Across the entire weekend, there was a consistent dip between 09:00 - 11:00 UTC. For the U.S., this timeframe reflects the quiet early-morning hours before major promotional activity begins. In Europe, shoppers have already browsed (and likely purchased), while in many APAC markets, the day is winding down in the late evening. These overlapping down-cycles create a natural trough before traffic ramps up again.

While the peak on Black Friday may not be as tall as it used to be, it is still the winner of the Cyber 5 weekend. As seen in the image above, the largest single-day spike appeared on Black Friday around 15:00 UTC, which equates to 10 AM ET. Essentially, shoppers woke up that day and got right to filling their carts. While it may hold the title for the highest moment of traffic, it no longer towers above the rest of the month – the advantage is small and shrinking.

Speaking of shrinking, remember the days when Cyber Monday was the day to shop for all your electronic needs? But with most shopping being online, and sales that were once designated for Monday being all weekend (if not all month long), the distinctness of Monday traffic has softened. Our observations show Cyber Monday behaving similarly to the surrounding days, rather than standing out as a large crescendo.

The Bots are Coming… But Not Yet!

Each year, and with growing urgency, one question comes up: are bots increasingly driving holiday traffic?

Based on what we saw across the Cyber 5 weekend, bot traffic proportions didn’t meaningfully change. The lack of change in bot proportions suggests that, despite broader industry anxiety around automated shopping agents and AI-driven purchasing, the core makeup of traffic during Cyber 5 remains largely consistent year-over-year. In other words, whatever bot pressure retailers experience during normal periods isn’t materially amplified by holiday incentives, not yet at least.

The takeaway for retailers: today’s peak traffic pattern remains largely human, but the predictable bot baseline we see today may not hold forever. As automation becomes more sophisticated, its impact on future seasons could become far more pronounced.

A Glimpse Ahead: Preparing for Agentic Commerce

While this year’s Cyber 5 data shows that human shoppers still drive the overwhelming majority of traffic, the retail industry is already looking ahead at something bigger: agentic commerce.

In this emerging model, AI agents act on behalf of consumers and businesses – discovering products, comparing options, and even completing purchases autonomously. It’s still early, but this shift could fundamentally change how traffic behaves during future peak seasons. Instead of human-driven surges, retailers may see more continuous, machine-paced workloads and interactions that occur long before a shopper visits a site.

Commerce brands preparing for this future will rely on the same foundations that matter today: fast infrastructure, resilient systems, strong security, and real time visibility. As autonomous agents become part of the shopping ecosystem, these capabilities will only grow more important. 

Is Black Friday Still Special?

When we widen the lens and look beyond the Cyber 5 weekend at all of November, the story becomes clearer: traffic throughout the month is elevated, steady, and increasingly flat.

A few notable findings:

• Black Friday was only 10.8% above the November daily average.

• Thanksgiving Day dipped. A distinct low point emerged on Thanksgiving, suggesting shoppers were busier with more traditional priorities before diving in the next morning.

• Traffic has been rising since Early October. We saw a consistent upward trend leading into November, another sign that peak season starts earlier than most planning cycles assume.

Overall, November no longer behaves like a lead-up to a single high-volume event. It’s beginning to resemble a period of elevated demand.

A Look Back: Cyber 5 2024 vs 2025

To compare year-over-year traffic reliably, we only evaluated Commerce customers who sent traffic to Fastly in both 2024 and 2025.

Here’s what’s changed:

What we found is that traffic patterns stayed largely the same, but overall volume increased, suggesting that shopper behavior itself hasn’t radically shifted. The most significant difference is that shoppers were notably morning-heavy in 2024, while in 2025, traffic remained strong throughout the US day. This aligns with how retailers stagger promotions and how shoppers browse: through apps, mobile devices, and social media prompts at all hours.

Some of the differences we see may simply come from how traffic is being routed this year compared to last or how retailers choose to distribute their traffic, such as utilizing a Multi-CDN or other routing strategies that have evolved over the years. Even so, the broader theme holds: shoppers are spreading their activity across more hours and days, contributing to a Cyber 5 experience that feels less like a large spike and more like a sustained all-day event.

This shift is best exemplified by looking at the data over an even longer period. Repeating the same methodology of looking at just the Commerce customers with Fastly over the last 5 years, we took the average traffic over the same period each year and plotted them against each other.

When we look at just 2025, we see that much of the month sits around 0, which represents the period’s daily average. While we see the largest deviation from the average happens on Black Friday, the subsequent spike on Cyber Monday is in line with deviations we saw previously in November, furthering the notion that shoppers are filling their carts earlier in the month.

The deviation in expected shopping patterns is most apparent when we expand this view across six years, all the way back to 2020. From this view, we can see just how much traffic deviated from the average in 2020, 2022, and 2023 across Cyber 5, whereas 2025, in contrast, falls closer to the zero deviation line. 

This view makes it clear that the spikes associated with Black Friday and the whole Cyber 5 window are not what they once were, and organizations should plan accordingly with this data in mind.

What This Means for Engineering and Operations Teams

The evolution of Cyber 5 doesn’t just reshape shopper behavior, it reshapes reliability work. These traffic patterns highlight where engineering teams may need to adjust their playbooks for future seasons.

• Peak season planning should cover the full month – not just five days. With traffic climbing earlier and staying elevated, November increasingly behaves like an extended high-demand window. Capacity planning and staffing should reflect a continuous load, not a short holiday spike.

• Consider starting development code freezes earlier. If shoppers arrive earlier, stabilizing changes earlier reduces risk. Freezes tied to actual traffic behavior, not legacy Cyber 5 timelines, offer less risk during rising demand.

• Live observability matters, but the window is broader. Spikes still occur, but they’re distributed across more hours and days. Teams need visibility across a wider time range, with monitoring tuned for sustained activity rather than a single dramatic spike.

These shifts mean peak season engineering is no longer about surviving one big moment. It’s about managing uncertainty, planning for sustained traffic, and building resilience into every layer, setting retailers up for a smoother season ahead.

How Fastly Helps Retailers Navigate Peak Seasons

Even if Black Friday looks different now, the stakes for performance, security, and reliability remain high. Fastly’s platform is designed to help teams stay ahead of that shift with tools that improve stability, visibility, resiliency, and responsiveness during high-demand periods.

Observability to support quick decision-making. As traffic becomes more distributed across devices, regions, and times of day, Fastly’s Observability tools help teams diagnose performance issues efficiently and maintain consistent user experiences.

Real time visibility for longer high traffic windows. With elevated loads lasting weeks rather than days, teams benefit from clear insight into request patterns and performance. Live Event Monitoring (LEM) provides real time visibility that helps retailers identify issues quickly and maintain a smooth experience throughout the season. With Live Event Monitoring, our Fastly engineers partner with your teams to both achieve the same common goal – deliver the best user experiences possible, no matter the issues behind the scenes.

A network built for consistent performance. Fastly’s globally distributed edge and routing capabilities help Commerce brands deliver fast, reliable experiences even when demand fluctuates. This is especially valuable as traffic patterns stretch across more hours and regions.

Instant updates for dynamic promotions. Retailers frequently adjust prices, inventory, and creative assets throughout the month of November. Instant Purge makes these updates available almost instantly, reducing the risk of outdated content during fast-moving promotional cycles.

Security that protects key shopping periods – and beyond. With a longer window of elevated traffic, ecommerce sites face more exposure. Fastly’s security solutions, such as the Next-Gen WAF, Bot Management, and DDoS protection, help safeguard customer interactions and keep sites stable when activity is at its highest.

Together, these capabilities help retailers navigate a peak season that is no longer defined by a single surge but by sustained demand and evolving shopping behavior. Fastly’s data highlights a simple truth: the holiday season is evolving, and success now depends on resilience and visibility throughout the entire period, not just during one marquee moment. Retailers who recognize this shift will be better positioned to deliver the fast, safe experiences customers expect year-round. If you’re rethinking how to prepare for the next peak season, we’d love to help you build a strategy for stability, visibility, and performance – all year long.