Case Study: Shopify achieves lightning-fast global Black Friday scale for 1,000,000 storefronts with Cloudflare

Powering 1,000,000 Storefronts on the Biggest Shopping Weekend of the Year

Shopify, which powers storefronts for over one million businesses worldwide, needed to guarantee best‑in‑class performance, security, and reliability for a global customer base where slow or unreliable experiences directly cost merchants—especially during huge traffic spikes like Black Friday. Rather than build its own global network footprint, Shopify faced the challenge of delivering consistent, low‑latency service across 175 countries without burdening merchants with configuration changes.

Shopify joined Cloudflare’s global network (200+ cities), using edge load balancing and IP broadcasting to improve speed and reliability while onboarding over one million domains and certificates with rollback safeguards. The migration was seamless, and on Black Friday 2019 Shopify handled a 60% year‑over‑year sales increase (from $1.8B to $2.9B), 25.5M buyers, peak sales of $1.5M per minute, 19% cross‑border purchases and 69% mobile transactions—delivering faster, more reliable shopping experiences worldwide.

Shopify

Charles Ng

Production Engineering Manager