Spain's Difficult Road To Black Friday

As we become more cashless by the day, card payments are now critical infrastructure

Spain is an amazing country. Sangria, Football, Beaches, Churros. Those who have been to Spain will know it’s far more than just these clichés. But in the run up to Black Friday in Spain something went majorly wrong.

Before going into further details, let’s understand why is Black Friday so important?

The Plaza de España in Seville, Spain. Photo by Joan Oger on Unsplash

Black Friday is a big deal for shopping. It’s an annual event of discounts and special offers which takes place on the Friday after Thanksgiving in the US. Although Europe doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving - except for American expats - Black Friday also occurs in Europe on the same day. In 2023 it was on November the 24th, and this year it’ll be on November the 29th.

Black Friday has become such a huge deal that it’s spilled over to the following Monday, so-called Cyber Monday. As the name implies, Cyber Monday has been positioned as a day to shop online, with many one-day-only discounts and special offers available. Yet many retailers now have a whole long weekend of discounts, whether in-store or online.

Payments company Stripe put out a press release following Black Friday. This included some history on the origins of the event:

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… 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.

The rest of the press release mentions the record-breaking volumes processed by Stripe during the long-weekend:

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. [At peak there were] 93,304 transactions per minute, while maintaining API uptime greater than 99.999%

Stripe's systems were available more than 99.999% of the time during BFCM - essentially zero downtime. Software engineers refer to this 99.999% API uptime as "five nines", and when it comes to payment processing, an availability standard such as this is often included in contractual agreements. High levels of uptime can be significant for large businesses with many stores, extended opening hours, or those that trade online 24/7/365. Any downtime is likely to equate to lost sales.