Good morning, Riveters.
Holiday traffic is surging, and so is the chaos that comes with it. This week’s Rivet Report looks at why outages hit harder during the busiest shopping season of the year, and how a single failure at a cloud provider, PSP, or AI tool can wipe out more revenue in one hour than most brands make in a week.
Plus, you'll discover the resilience moves smart operators are putting in place right now to stay online while their competitors scramble. If you want to protect your holiday sales and keep growth steady when the internet gets shaky, this issue is worth your time.
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BUSINESS PULSE
Economy
US consumer confidence plunges as uncertainty mounts.
The latest reading from The Conference Board shows its Consumer Confidence Index dropped to 88.7 in November, the lowest since April. Reasons? Inflation, trade uncertainty, and the recent government shutdown among the top concerns.
What this means to you.
If you’re selling to consumers in the United States, especially younger or lower-income cohorts, plan for tighter wallets and modest growth. It’s a good time to revisit pricing, optimize conversion paths, and tighten cash flow.
Source: Reuters
AI
AI investment keeps flowing: Over 45 “mega-rounds” in 2025.
According to a new roundup, AI funding in 2025 matches or even exceeds 2024 totals in the United States. As of late November, dozens of AI firms have closed $100M+ rounds, and many more have raised substantial seed or growth rounds.
What this means to you
If you’re in tech or SaaS, odds are strong there’s an AI tool or partner coming to market soon that could give you an edge — or disrupt you. Keep tabs on the space and plan for potential integrations before your competitors do.
Source: Tech Crunch
Startups
AI security and tooling startups lead the latest funding wave.
Recent funding rounds show a clear pattern: investors are backing startups focused on AI security, infrastructure, and enterprise tools. Companies like Clover Security (AI-driven product security) and others building AI-first tooling just locked in fresh rounds.
What this means to you
If you run a startup or plan to launch one, the next class of winners may be those who solve AI tooling and safety. Even if you’re not building AI, there are adjacencies worth exploring, especially if your business relies on automation, data, or security.
Source: TechStartups
ALWAYS ON ADVANTAGE
The internet keeps breaking, and nobody is ever ready.
Let’s start with a simple truth most people tiptoe around: your business is far more fragile than you think.
Having an outage with a cloud provider can take down a store, agents, checkout, or an entire operation. You don’t control it. You don’t cause it. You just eat the cost.
Cloudflare runs an update, and half the internet freezes.
AWS hiccups, and commerce comes to a halt.
Shopify slows down, and checkout pages go offline.
Should teams treat these moments like the cost of doing business?
“It happens.”
But to those running a business that earns money online, these outages are not just news events. They’re operational blind spots that hit revenue, trust, and momentum.
But this matters for a deeper reason. Your growth engine has more single points of failure than you think.
Everyone talks about AI replacing repetitive work. Cool. Until the API goes down.
If your agents handle onboarding, reset passwords, guide checkouts, or nudge customers to pay a bill, then you’re betting on consistent uptime. Agents don’t improvise. They don’t “come back later.”
They just stop working.
When an outage hits, the humans aren’t standing by to catch the tasks. You’re left with a quiet pile of things that didn’t happen.
This isn’t an argument against AI. It’s a reminder that automation increases your exposure to outages because you remove the humans who used to patch gaps.
This is the shift that’s worth paying attention to.
Outages create separation. Some brands freeze. Others stay online and scoop up demand without lifting a finger. Customers notice who is open when the rest of the internet falls over.
This turns resilience into something bigger. Not a safety net, a growth lever.
If you’re always available when others are not, you don’t just protect revenue. You win trust, repeat customers, and the quiet advantage of showing up when competitors can’t
A simple playbook for founders
Start with clarity. Make a short list of your dependencies: DNS, CDN, PSP, cloud region, AI provider. These are your weak links.
Add redundancy where it hurts most.
Two DNS providers.
Multiple PSPs.
Deploy your checkout in more than one availability zone.
If your card data is trapped inside a single PSP, give yourself a way out.
Build fallbacks.
If a provider is down, don’t throw an error. Give the user another path or let your system queue the work.
Run a fake outage twice a year. You’ll learn more in one hour of controlled chaos than in 20 pages of planning.
The takeaway?
The internet is not getting more stable. Why should your business get caught off guard? Shopify went down on Cyber Monday, did you have a backup plan?
Stability is a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight. In the age of AI-driven operations and 24/7 global revenue, the companies that stay online the longest win the most.
That’s the part no one is talking about.
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GROWTH PLAY OF THE WEEK
Reduce your dependency risk before it reduces your revenue.
When a single vendor outage can knock out your checkout, your onboarding, or your AI agents, you’re not scaling a business. You’re balancing on someone else’s tightrope.
This week’s growth play is simple: diversify one mission-critical dependency. Add a second payment processor. Set up a backup DNS provider. Move your customer data or card data into a system you control. You don’t need a full infrastructure overhaul. You just need one strategic shift that removes a single point of failure. The payoff is real. More uptime. More captured revenue. Less panic when the internet stumbles. This is the kind of “boring” move that quietly compounds.