In the digital world, performance, availability, and reliability are key pillars of business that can impact revenue, reputation, and operational excellence. We often write about the impact that third-party services have on performance on our blog, but sometimes that impact is felt in our personal lives as well. Every year, we monitor major retailers’ performance and availability during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, testing to capture the inevitable failures and outages as traffic volumes climb to record highs. This year, however, most of these retailers did amazingly well and I am very happy for them.