Vercel’s BFCM 2024: A Platform Under Full Load

Vercel’s public dashboard, launched ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), offered a real-time look at platform activity during the retail industry’s busiest period. The final metrics show a platform engineered for extreme scale: Vercel processed over 86.7 billion requests, including peak throughput of 1.9 million requests per second, while maintaining 99.9992% uptime across the event. Customers shipped 2.4 million deployments, and the platform’s security layer logged 3.05 billion system-triggered firewall blocks alongside another 519.8 million blocks from customer-specific Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules.

Managing Peaks and Mitigating Attacks

At its most intense moments, Vercel was serving more than 270,000 legitimate requests per second while simultaneously absorbing over 1.75 million DDoS requests per second. Behind the scenes, the platform executed more than 28.9 billion function invocations, covering Serverless Functions, Edge Functions, and Edge Middleware. Two features proved essential for keeping traffic flowing without manual intervention:

  • Function failover regions: If a region becomes unresponsive, traffic automatically moves to a healthy one with no redeployment needed.
  • Auto-scaling concurrency: All functions scale automatically based on demand, making the platform suited for unpredictable spikes.

Performance That Converts

Speed and personalization are central to ecommerce success, and Vercel’s infrastructure is built to handle both without sacrificing responsiveness. During the shopping weekend, the platform handled more than 60 million requests to checkout paths and facilitated over 734 million connections to ecommerce backends like BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, and Stripe. Two mechanisms helped keep those experiences fast:

  • Routing Middleware: Enables server-side personalization, tailoring responses based on behavior, location, or segmentation without relying on client-side logic that can cause visual delays.
  • Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR): Allows static assets to be created and updated automatically without a redeploy, improving performance and reducing backend load.

Deploying on a Holiday Schedule

Teams used the long weekend to ship at scale, with more than 2.4 million deployments pushing code to production. The platform’s architecture simplifies this process via framework-defined infrastructure, which analyzes code on each deployment to allocate the appropriate global infrastructure automatically. Instant rollbacks also played a role: with a single click, teams could restore a previous deployment to recover from a bad release, adding confidence to last-minute changes during a high-traffic period.

A Security Layer That Doesn’t Slow Things Down

Vercel’s WAF offers L3/L4 protection at every edge location. Across BFCM, it took more than 6.3 billion total actions, including 3 billion blocks, 2.2 billion challenges, and the 519 million custom WAF blocks mentioned earlier. That protection included two key components:

  • DDoS mitigation: Automated detection blocks abnormal or suspicious traffic without manual configuration.
  • Web Application Firewall with persistent actions: Customer-defined rules can block or challenge specific requests. Persistent actions go a step further, stopping repeat offenders for a specified timeframe to prevent unnecessary overhead.

A Record-Breaking Run

From peak requests per second, Vercel saw 80% year-over-year growth across the BFCM 2024 window. The overall takeaway: the platform was not just resillient under the industry’s biggest test, but demonstrated that companies can ship on a weekend schedule, maintain scale, and weather sustained attack volumes on their busiest days.