High demand should be a good thing, but retailers are now facing a new threat: “success disasters.”
In 2026, major retailers will move beyond traditional scaling strategies and start preparing for this different kind of challenge. Not the slow, manageable kind of success, but the sudden surge of popularity that strains even the most carefully planned systems. Success disasters happen when interest spikes, traffic surges, and infrastructure simply can’t keep up.
These failures don’t happen because something went wrong. They happen because everything went right. From viral product launches to high-traffic sales events, these moments are business-critical. And when systems fail at the peak of attention, the damage is immediate. The average outage costs more than $100,000, but the long-term impact goes further: lost trust, angry customers, public scrutiny, and even regulatory attention.
Success disasters are becoming more common
Part of the problem is the rise of agentic AI. Consumers are beginning to rely on AI agents to help them find deals, make purchases, and navigate eCommerce platforms. These agents don’t sleep, they don’t get distracted, and they can generate massive amounts of traffic in a short window. That creates new kinds of stress on systems that were built for human patterns. For example, when Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour sales took down Ticketmaster, that was just human participants, now imagine what that infrastructure strain looks like with AI agents in the mix.
At the same time, customers have more choice and less patience. If your checkout page times out or your app crashes, they’ll move on. A competitor is just a click away. And if that failure happens at scale, social media ensures that news of it spreads fast. For retailers, the stakes have never been higher. The spotlight is no longer a reward. It’s a pressure test.
Resilience must come before growth
Retailers used to build systems for predictable peaks like Black Friday or holiday shopping seasons. But in 2026, traffic will be driven by real-time events and unpredictable trends. Retailers need to start designing for scale from day one.
That means shifting how teams think about architecture. Instead of building around a single cloud region or relying on a monolithic database, retailers should adopt distributed, multi-region infrastructure that eliminates single points of failure and handles variable demand more gracefully. They should build systems that assume the environment will be unreliable and remain online in the likely event of outage.
Prepare for the spike, not just the average
Success disasters can be avoided. But prevention requires a more disciplined and comprehensive approach to testing. Traditional load tests are not enough. Teams should also run soak tests to understand how systems hold up under sustained pressure, and breakpoint tests to identify exactly when and where things start to fail.
Don’t wait for the post-mortem
Companies shouldn’t need to recover from success disasters. The tools exist today to build systems that scale on demand and remain available, even when demand is higher than ever. The key is to use technology that can horizontally scale, replicate data across regions, and maintain consistency through it all.
If something does go wrong, transparency matters. Customers don’t expect perfection. But they do expect communication. Being open about when you encounter outages and what you’re doing to fix them can go a long way in preserving trust.
Success should not be a risk
As retailers head into 2026, success will be a new failure mode. The question isn’t whether you can handle a regular day, it’s whether your systems are built to thrive in a moment of explosive attention. If you aren’t planning for the best-case scenario, you’re more likely to encounter the worst. Make sure your infrastructure is ready to succeed with you.
