We’ve all done it—waited until the very last minute to do our holiday shopping, thanks to the convenience of modern internet-powered shopping. Online retailers even give us little indicators to show whether an item will arrive in time for Christmas. Heck, they might even wrap it for you.
Behind the scenes, the logistics are insane—and the infrastructure needed to make the behemoth of online shopping run smoothly involves a huge number of moving parts that need to work all day, every day. Christmas is obviously a time of heavy strain for these systems, and Target just showed us exactly what happens if you rely on technology to save Christmas.
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How Target’s systems collapsed at the worst possible moment
Starting on December 19, 2025 (as reported in Business Insider), one of the USA’s largest retailers, Target, started having trouble with its “digital experience.” This included both the Target app and website. This happened days before Christmas and is likely one of the last opportunities to get little Timmy’s Nintendo delivered in time.
So you can imagine reactions ranging from mild annoyance to genuine panic as people saw card charge holds, but all traces of their orders were gone. Checkout screens froze or timed out, and the specter of delays at a crucial time reared its head. Curbside pickups and returns were affected too, with the clock ticking down to the big day.
As you can see from this Downdetector chart, there was a big spike in reports on the 19th of December.
Somewhat ironically, Target’s customer support reminded everyone that they still have brick-and-mortar stores, and that these were running just fine. On Saturday, the company announced that its services had been fully restored, but we’ll probably never know what the real total impact was.
This year was already notable for large tech outages
By my count, this is the fourth notable outage of 2025 when it comes to online services. We saw half the web go down along with Cloudflare, IoT gadgets and numerous web services fail thanks to Amazon Web Services going down, and Microsoft Azure also decided to go on the Fritz.
This was perhaps the year when the largest number of people realized how much of their daily life now relies on a distant computer in a building somewhere. Both our work and personal lives are now wrapped up with these convenient systems. We rushed into using them because of that convenience and in some cases wiped out the little guys around the corner as a result.
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I remember very clearly the first time I placed an online order. I ordered a pair of books: Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines and Perdido Street Station by China Miéville. I had zero trust that these books would arrive, but after making my first successful purchase on the internet, it became the main way I bought anything within just a few years.
I literally used Amazon’s next-day delivery service to get my wife her Christmas present a day or two before writing this. Because I knew from experience that I could push that deadline a little and still have everything sewn up during a very busy month.
But, what happened to Target could’ve happened to Amazon or any other online retailer. I could also have literally driven to a store ten minutes away and bought the same item. Probably for a little less money too. These outages and the Target fiasco will definitely make me rethink my shopping habits going ahead.
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You know, writing about how unreliable the internet has become over the past year is starting to feel like a pattern. There’s definitely a trend towards owning content like physical books, movies, and music. For software that doesn’t have to be tethered to a server to work, and for real ownership, control, and predictability in our lives. Something that internet technology is taking away bit-by-bit.
Shopping can be a chore, but it also used to be an experience. Especially around Christmastime. Leaving the house and actually browsing stuff, or enjoying some of the festive atmosphere (that’s somehow been up since November) might not be a bad idea. It’s probably healthier for you than doom-scrolling social media while you wait for your packages to arrive.
