Brief summary During Black Week campaigns, site traffic was significantly higher than normal, amplified by heavy bot traffic. New server capacity was taken into use on Thursday 27 November at ~17:00 to handle this load. A configuration error on the new servers affected a small number of (mainly newer) shops, causing connection errors for those shops between ~17:00–17:53. To resolve this, the new capacity was taken out of rotation. As the fixed capacity could not be safely reintroduced before Black Friday midnight, the initial Black Friday peak ran without the extra resources. Combined with the very high traffic, this lack of extra capacity caused general slowness and connection errors in the environment during peak hour after midnight.
Immediate resolution At 17:53 the new misconfigured servers were removed from rotation, immediately restoring correct behavior for the affected shops but leaving the platform back on constrained capacity. The next morning, after fixing the configuration and verifying it, the new capacity was brought back online, which reduced load and clearly improved shop performance and response times.