Cyber Monday traffic is a different beast - it’s not just more load, it’s bursty, write-heavy, and tied to external systems. A small issue in auth or POS can ripple across the entire commerce stack.

Curious to see if Shopify publishes a postmortem; these incidents usually reveal interesting real-world bottlenecks.

It's also the first of the month. Typically also a heavy day so the combination it seems was too much.