Over the last few weeks here at Open-Xchange we have been busy preparing OX as a Service (OXaaS) for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We tackled these two major consumer events head on with the OXaaS platform for the first time this year.
Beforehand we often heard from our customers that traffic increases over these days could leave them uneasy, concerned at the sheer volume of data handling required. Previously many of them had even been forced to close their business during this period. This of course doesn’t include the risk of completely overwhelmed call centres which in turn can cause dramatic costs.
As such, the OXaaS team has been busy adding additional hardware, tuning configurations, restructuring network layouts and setting up emergency plans. These plans include backup and predefined escalation paths over multiple teams and timezones to cope with the unprecedented spikes in demand.
It’s with great pleasure that I can announce that all of their preparation has paid off. The OXaaS platforms in the US and Europe handled the additional load capably, as did the supporting backends put in place by our suppliers. Nothing went down and the service was fully operational for the entire weekend.
Black Friday hit us particularly strongly in Europe with 41% more emails delivered than average and 11% more users logged in during this timeframe. Cyber Monday was more relaxed with only 14% more emails delivered at peak time and 11% more logins.
In the US it was Cyber Monday that took the crown with 61% more delivered email over the whole day. This huge spike equates to roughly 70k emails delivered per minute.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are always a crunch time for digital services but we’re proud that OXaaS, with the hard work of our dedicated team, was more than capable of standing up (literally!) to the challenge.