As retailers and enterprises across South Africa prepare for the annual Black Friday surge on 28 November, network resilience is once again in sharp focus.
For many organisations, the festive trading season is the ultimate stress test, one where downtime can have immediate and costly consequences.
Online transaction volumes continue to climb each year. During Black Friday 2024, PayFast recorded a peak of 2,185 transactions per minute, while just three of South Africa’s banks reported more than R30-billion spent.
With most of those sales reliant on digital platforms, payment gateways, and cloud-based systems, uninterrupted connectivity has become a cornerstone of operational success.
Yet South Africa’s connectivity landscape remains vulnerable to disruption. Fibre breaks caused by construction or theft, power interruptions, and network congestion all pose real risks during high-demand periods.
A single outage at the wrong moment can affect everything from in-store payment terminals to online checkout systems and warehouse logistics.
“Connectivity failures rarely happen at convenient times,” says Justin Mackenzie, MD of VO Connect. “When your main link goes down on the busiest day of the year, you don’t just lose transactions, you lose momentum and customer trust. The reputational cost can be far greater than the immediate loss in sales.
“More importantly, it’s the extended trading period from Black Friday through Christmas and into January,” he adds.
“Ensuring continuity isn’t about surviving one day, it’s about maintaining reliability throughout the entire trading period when demand and expectations are heightened.”
Planning for failure
Experts agree that the key to avoiding those losses lies in proactive planning and network design that accounts for failure. Too many businesses, says Mackenzie, still depend on a single point of connectivity.
“Even large enterprises often operate on one primary fibre line with no automatic failover,” Mackenzie notes. “When that link fails, recovery process can take hours or days.
“During a peak trading period, that kind of downtime is catastrophic. The revenue at risk is often times far greater than the cost of maintaining a backup link.
“In many cases, the monthly investment for failover is less than a basic grocery shop, yet organisations still try to save on connectivity, while unknowingly exposing themselves to losses in the hundreds of thousands.”
Industry specialists are increasingly advocating for a layered approach to connectivity that combines different access technologies to create redundancy and minimise risk.
Pairing fibre with wireless or licensed-spectrum connectivity provides alternative pathways to the internet, ensuring that traffic can be rerouted automatically when a fault occurs. When supported by intelligent network management tools such as SD-WAN, these pathways can be balanced and switched automatically, allowing operations to continue without noticeable interruption to the end user.
This model, already common in financial services and logistics, is becoming more relevant to retail, manufacturing, and service industries as their operations digitise.
“It’s about continuity,” Mackenzie explains. “You can’t eliminate every risk, but you can design your network so that a single point of failure doesn’t take the entire business offline.
“Even if you’re operating at reduced capacity when one link fails, being at 25% is still far better than being completely down.
A competitive necessity
The pressure on networks is only expected to increase as more South Africans shop online, work remotely, and depend on cloud applications. For many organisations, the lesson from recent years is clear: redundancy isn’t a luxury, it’s a competitive necessity.
“Businesses that can maintain uptime during seasonal peaks have a distinct advantage,” says Mackenzie. “Their customers experience consistency and reliability, which translates directly into loyalty. The ones who can’t keep their systems online, risk being left behind.”
With less than two weeks to go until Black Friday, enterprises are being encouraged to review their connectivity resilience, checking for failover, verifying backup links, and ensuring their networks can handle the load.
“Black Friday exposes weaknesses that might go unnoticed during the rest of the year,” Mackenzie concludes. “If your connectivity can withstand that pressure, you’re not only ready for the festive season, you’re ready for whatever 2026 brings.”