Black Friday Code Freeze Alerts: New Way to Protect Your Web

For online retailers, the holiday season is both a golden opportunity and a period of heightened risk. High traffic, large volumes of transactions, and ever-changing promotional campaigns create the perfect storm for technical issues. Even a minor bug or unplanned code change can disrupt the customer experience and even lead to lost sales.

Code Freeze Pros and Cons

To prevent these issues, many e-commerce, and travel and hospitality platforms implement a retail code freeze – a planned, temporary pause on non-critical code changes. During this period, only essential bug fixes are allowed, ensuring that the site remains stable while millions of customers browse and purchase products.

Despite these precautions, changes to first-party or third-party code can still occur, potentially slipping past manual checks or monitoring processes. For online retailers, the challenge lies in maintaining visibility and control over code changes without adding operational overhead or generating a flood of irrelevant alerts.

The Hightened Risk of Black Friday

Even with a code freeze, organizations face several challenges:

1. Undetected First-Party Changes: Developers may inadvertently push changes during a freeze, affecting critical functionality like checkout, payment processing, or product listings.
   
2. Third-Party Scripts: Marketing, analytics, and other third-party scripts continue to run and occasionally update automatically, potentially impacting performance or collecting sensitive data. Furthermore, these scripts might activate fourth- and fifth-party code changes
   
3. Alert Fatigue: Manual monitoring or poorly configured systems can generate excessive notifications for every minor change, making it difficult to identify truly critical issues.
   
4. Limited Context: Knowing that a change occurred is often not enough. Teams need clarity on which changes are significant and which are routine, without delving into excessive technical detail.
   

Introducing Code Freeze Alerts

To address these challenges, Reflectiz introduces a new feature: Code Freeze Alerts for Black Friday and the Holiday Season.

This feature is specifically designed to help online retailers maintain control during critical periods when even minor disruptions can have major consequences.

How Black Friday Code Freeze Alerts Work

1. Users define the exact period when the organization implements its code freeze policy. This allows the system to focus monitoring and alerts only on the high-risk timeframe. During the time period selected, the system will scan the site daily, regardless of the original scan schedule.
   
2. Differentiated Alerting:
   
   • High-severity alerts are triggered for first-party code changes, ensuring that any potentially critical modification is immediately visible.
     
   • Low-severity alerts are generated for third-party code changes, providing context without overwhelming teams.
     

The alerts does not require users to take immediate action. The goal is to help teams validate the code freeze, particularly first-party code, so they can ensure critical functionality is enforced and protected during peak periods.

Additional Layar of Security

The Black Friday and Holiday Season Alerts feature provides peace of mind for online retail teams, allowing them to focus on maximizing sales rather than firefighting unexpected code changes. With this feature, Reflectiz users gain a powerful safety net during their busiest periods, ensuring site stability, protecting revenue, and maintaining a seamless customer experience. 

Reflectiz’s mission is to equip brands with next-generation tools designed to create transparency and assurance in their web security operations. The Code freeze feature is just one of many in development that will allow organizations to track and validate the real-time behavior of their third-party code across all digital assets.