Black Friday 2025 shattered records. According to the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics, 202.9 million U.S. consumers shopped during the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, the highest turnout since tracking began in 2017*. Behind every card transaction, issuing platforms faced their ultimate stress test.
For years, the payments industry accepted a trade-off: you could build for innovation and flexibility, or you could build for massive scale, but not both. Legacy processors handled peak volumes, but moved slowly. Modern platforms offered agility, but faced questions about capacity when it mattered most.
This Black Friday proved that assumption wrong.
Performance when it counts
Marqeta's platform during the 2025 holiday weekend:
- Reached 1,100 transactions per second at peak on Black Friday, a 32% increase year-over-year—with zero performance degradation
- API requests per second grew 43% year-over-year—handling the complexity modern commerce demands
- 99.999% uptime on Black Friday—maintaining five 9s reliability even as scale increased
- Sub-200ms response times even as traffic spiked
These aren't just numbers. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, every second of downtime has direct consequences for issuers. When authorization systems fail or slow down, cardholders experience declined transactions—even when they have available funds. The result: they reach for a different card, and the issuer permanently loses both the interchange revenue and potentially top-of-wallet status.
The hidden complexity behind every transaction
Here's what's changed: a single transaction today isn't just an authorization request. It triggers fraud checks, rewards calculations, spending limit verifications, and intelligent routing decisions all in real time. One transaction now generates 3-5 API calls that must process in parallel without bottlenecks.
That 43% year-over-year increase in API requests? That's the reality of modern card issuing. Your infrastructure doesn't just need to handle more authorizations; it needs to handle exponentially more decisions per transaction, instantly.
What separates platforms that scale from those that don't
When evaluating issuing infrastructure, the questions that matter:
Can it scale without warning?
Peak transaction volumes don't wait for capacity planning. Your platform either handles instant 10x spikes or it doesn't.
Does reliability hold under real pressure?
Ask for actual Black Friday metrics, not theoretical uptime. The difference between 99.9% and 99.999% uptime is the difference between 8.76 hours of downtime annually and just 5.26 minutes. For issuers, that downtime means declined transactions and cardholders switching to competitors. Multi-region redundancy and automatic fail-over aren't optional, they're table stakes.
Is it built for API-heavy workloads?
Modern issuing platforms process dozens of real-time decisions per authorization. Infrastructure that can handle multiple API requests at once maintains speed. Systems that process calls one-at-a-time create delays.
Has it proven itself when it matters?
Stress tests in a lab are one thing. Performance during actual Black Friday traffic is another.
The cost of infrastructure failure for issuers
The stakes during peak shopping periods are straightforward:
When your issuing platform experiences downtime or degraded performance, authorization requests fail. Cardholders with available credit or funds see their transactions declined. In those moments, they can pull out a different card, allowing your competitor to capture not only the transaction, but also the opportunity to earn your cardholder's loyalty. Cards that fail during critical moments lose top-of-wallet status.
What issuers lose:
- Interchange revenue on that transaction
- Top-of-wallet position
- Cardholder trust when their card fails at the worst possible moment
At 1,100 authorization requests per second during peak periods, even brief outages compound quickly. One hour of downtime equals 3.6 million cardholders reaching for a different card.
During Black Friday, when consumer spending peaks and transaction velocity is highest, these aren't theoretical risks. They're the actual cost of infrastructure that can't maintain performance under load.
Why this matters now
Card transaction volumes continue to grow annually. Authorization complexity accelerates as issuers layer in more sophisticated fraud detection, real-time rewards, and dynamic spending controls. Cardholder expectations for instant approvals are non-negotiable.
The gap is widening between issuing platforms that can scale instantly and those that require advance notice. Between infrastructure that maintains sub-200ms authorization times under load and systems that degrade during peak demand.
Your cardholders won't wait for slow authorizations. They won't retry when they know they have available funds. They'll simply use a different card—in seconds.
Infrastructure built for your biggest moments
Marqeta's platform reached 1,100 transactions per second at Black Friday's peak, 32% higher than 2024, with 38% growth on Cyber Monday and 43% more API requests, maintaining 99.999% reliability and sub-200ms response times. Not because we got lucky. Because we built for this.
*CNBC, Holiday shopping turnout jumps to 202.9 million people during Thanksgiving weekend, NRF says, December 2, 2025