Enterprises still talk about “preparing for peak” as if it’s a date on the calendar, a holiday code freeze, a summer travel rush, or a one-day flash sale. That mindset is outdated. Peak season isn’t a moment anymore; it’s the environment that modern businesses operate in every single day.
Traffic doesn’t wait for Black Friday. Fraud doesn’t pause after Cyber Monday. APIs don’t slow down when your marketing team stops promoting. And attackers certainly don’t follow retail calendars or travel seasons.
Because enterprises are still architected for predictable patterns in an unpredictable world, the biggest failures now happen between the traditional peaks — across commerce, travel, hospitality, airlines, quick-service restaurants (QSRs), and manufacturing.
Here’s the truth: Peak season is permanent. And only Akamai is built for that reality.
Peak pressure is relentless
Look at commerce. Shopper spend per visit dropped globally, while consumer expectations for delivery speed and personalization skyrocketed. Traffic surges vary wildly by region, campaign, and device, and loyalty is so volatile that one in two customers will simply wait for the best deals, pushing unpredictable spikes into narrow windows of time.
Retailers no longer control the rhythm of demand. Algorithms do. Influencers do. Third-party marketplaces do. And attackers absolutely do.
Travel and hospitality face the same volatility: loyalty program abuse, sudden spikes in search and booking flows, and API dependency chains that break under strain. Many travel and transportation providers operate with tens of thousands of APIs, which is far more than their teams can manually track, creating significant visibility gaps and high-severity exposures.
Meanwhile, manufacturing and QSR companies struggle with operational continuity as ransomware campaigns target not only their data but also their ability to function.
Across all sectors, the pattern is identical: Your next peak event will arrive faster than your teams can react, and it may not look anything like your last one.
Do we have peak season all wrong?
Most enterprises still prepare for peak season like it’s a once-a-year technical rehearsal by:
- Adding capacity
- Tightening rate limits
- Tuning policies
- Praying that nothing breaks
The problem?
Modern peak season failures are no longer capacity problems; they are security problems and, increasingly, AI problems.
Sudden traffic surges often reflect the activity of bots, not buyers, and checkout strain frequently comes from attackers rather than customers. API latency is just as likely to originate from third-party scripts and partner systems as from your own application.
AI is now amplifying these pressure points as trainer bots, agentic bots, and search-driven AI crawlers reshape discovery, demand signals, and traffic composition. Some AI bots drive revenue by improving search engine optimization (SEO) visibility and product discovery, while others consume resources or introduce risk.
Defend against malicious automation while optimizing for AI
To thrive in a world in which peak season is constant, companies must defend against malicious automation while optimizing for the AI systems that influence how customers and algorithms find them. This requires a progressive approach to agentic AI optimization that begins with visibility, grows into a clear understanding of what AI systems already know about your brand, and ultimately enables full optimization and governance across both search and AI ecosystems.
During the major attacks in 2025, Akamai saw massive Layer 7 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaigns targeting transactional endpoints, login, checkout, and sign-on, with record-breaking volumetrics (113 billion requests, more than 8 million requests per second). These were engineered to overwhelm business-critical flows, not just edge capacity.
During the commerce holiday season, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we also observed scraping levels far beyond the expected norms, driven in part by AI-powered harvesters seeking product, pricing, and catalog data. These moments act as a pressure test, revealing behaviors that no longer disappear once the calendar flips.
The implication for commerce brands is clear: Harmful scraping can erode performance and stability, while beneficial AI scraping can shape product visibility and downstream revenue.
Modern applications must be protected against abusive automation while also optimized to take advantage of AI-driven discovery that can influence how customers find and buy products.
In other words: Your business doesn’t fail during the busiest times because it’s too successful. It fails because attackers know that is the easiest time to break you.
This is the industry’s visibility gap, and the cost of treating peak as an annual ritual instead of an operating model.
Peak is the baseline. Build for it.
From Black Friday to Ramadan to Super Bowl streams to global travel windows, the world’s biggest brands run their highest-stakes moments on Akamai because they know two things are true:
- Security is the new uptime.
- Observability is the new readiness.
Security is the new uptime
Malicious bots, credential abuse, API exploitation, audience hijacking, and sophisticated scrapers shape the majority of peak-period risk, not raw traffic load. Retailers lose up to 15% of total visits to audience hijacking alone.
Observability is the new readiness
Most enterprises still can’t see half their third-party scripts, API calls, or client-side exposures. In commerce, more than 50% of websites rely on third-party JavaScript they don’t fully control, which creates hidden attack surfaces and compliance gaps. And airline API inventories show thousands of untracked endpoints holding sensitive data.
Take advantage of a peak-ready architecture
Peak-ready architecture must do more than scale. It must defend, detect, absorb, route, prioritize, and recover, instantly.
Akamai’s full-stack advantage provides that and integrates:
- Akamai Bot Manager, Akamai Content Protector, and Akamai Account Protector to stop fraud before it hits your workflow
- DDoS defense that’s built into a massively distributed edge
- Akamai API Security to eliminate visibility gaps at scale
- TrafficPeak observability for early detection of anomalies and surges
- Microsegmentation to contain ransomware and protect production environments
- Global compute at the edge to keep apps responsive during unpredictable demand
This isn’t defense in depth. This is defense when it matters and everywhere that peak can break you.
Be prepared for major surges
The unknowns are the new normal. And your next major surge might come from any of the following:
- A flash sale that goes viral unexpectedly
- A mobile ordering promo that explodes at lunchtime
- A weather event that triggers a wave of rebooking
- A botnet probing your weakest endpoint
- A DDoS attack aimed at your APIs
- A third-party script compromise
- A loyalty program attack during holidays
- A ransomware incident at a supplier
When surges are unpredictable, you must be prepared at all times.
Treat peak season as a continuous operating model
Peak season is no longer predictable, but Akamai is.
We’ve seen the patterns. Our global telemetry spans trillions of daily requests across applications, APIs, and users. We’ve mitigated the record-breaking attacks, protected trillions of interactions, and helped the largest airlines, retailers, hotels, manufacturers, and QSRs stay online when everything around them is failing. No one else has our scale, our visibility, or our history.
If peak is perpetual, then confidence must be too. Businesses that treat peak season as a one-time event will continue to scramble. Businesses that treat peak season as a continuous operating model will win.
We’re ready to help
Peak season isn’t approaching. Peak season is already here. The only question is whether your architecture knows that. Akamai does. And we’re ready when you are. Take action today.
Don't wait for tomorrow's threats to become today's reality. Contact Akamai to explore how our adaptive security solutions can help future-proof your retail organization against emerging cyberthreats.
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