Online Orders Without Downtime: How Restaurants and Retailers Can Ensure Stability and Growth

Imagine: you’ve launched an online ordering service for your restaurant. A beautiful interface, a clean, well-structured menu — everything looks better than what your competitors offer. The first orders start coming in. It feels like you can finally exhale.

And then Friday comes. Or Valentine’s Day. Or Mother’s Day. The queue of orders grows, the kitchen can’t keep up, couriers fall behind, the website starts freezing, administrators panic, and unhappy customers flood the phone lines and social media with angry comments. Sounds like a nightmare. But this scenario happens more often than you might think.

Digitalization in the U.S. restaurant industry is accelerating rapidly. According to Statista, the online food delivery market is expected to exceed $47 billion in 2025 and continues to grow by double digits every year. More and more cafés, restaurants, and retailers are adopting digital solutions — but not all of them can handle their own growth.

So what’s going wrong? The problem often lies in an unprepared system architecture and the lack of a clear scalability plan. Scalability is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a minimum requirement. But many businesses sacrifice it, uncertain about their future growth.

Sit back — we’ll show you why this matters.

Many believe that the hardest stage is the launch itself. In reality, the real challenges begin afterward. What do restaurant and retail businesses most often encounter?

• Peak traffic spikes — holidays, promotions, lunch rushes. The same moments that generate the most revenue often break the system.

How to Prepare Your Restaurant's Website and App for Peak Traffic

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• Weak architecture — when everything is tied into one monolith, a single update can bring everything down.
• Integrations can’t handle the load — the POS system fails, the CRM stops syncing, data gets lost.

• Limited support resources — “the site is down” equals “everything stops.”
• Reputation risks — users rarely return after an outage.

Anyone who’s ever “built a cart” only to have it vanish mid-order knows exactly how that feels.

Most companies only start thinking about scaling when it’s already too late. The system is down, and peak hours are turning into a loss. For our foodtech development projects, we always build room for growth into the architecture from day one.

Here’s what that means in practice:

• Break the system down into independent modules (microservices), rather than a single monolith.
• Use cloud solutions instead of hosting a server “in the basement.”
• Integrate DevOps processes — so updates don’t break the product.
• Plan growth scenarios ahead of time: not “what if it takes off,” but “when it takes off.”

Downtime is not a minor inconvenience. It’s real money.

Every minute of downtime means:

• lost orders,
• extra staff costs,
• poor user experience,
• lower ratings on aggregators.

To retain customers and grow steadily, it’s essential to:

• Set up monitoring and alerting systems (to detect issues before your customers do).

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• Define SLA and MTTR (clear recovery standards).

SLA (Service Level Agreement) — service level agreement.This defines how long it’s acceptable for your system to be down. For example: “If the website goes down, we’ll have it back up within 1 hour” or “Uptime guaranteed at 99.9%.”

MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery) — the average time your team needs to recover after an incident. For example: if there are three incidents in a month and each is resolved in 30 minutes, your MTTR is 30 minutes. The lower the MTTR, the less you lose.

• Build a fault-tolerant infrastructure.

If one cashier in a restaurant calls in sick, the service doesn’t stop — another steps in. The same principle applies to infrastructure:

1. backup servers pick up the load,
2. load balancing prevents the system from collapsing under traffic,
3. if one component fails, the rest keep running.

This kind of architecture protects your business from complete shutdown during critical moments. It’s especially relevant for aggregators and marketplaces.

• Organize 24/7 support or a rapid incident response process.

If you have 24/7 support, specialists respond instantly, regardless of the time of day. If you don’t, you need at least an automated alert system to notify your team of issues as they occur, so they can fix them quickly.

But in practice, 24/7 support can be expensive, so it’s smarter to minimize risk through proper testing strategies.

Scaling isn’t magic. It's a strategy. Here’s what you should plan for from the very beginning. 

Discuss this with your development team or the outsourcing company you work with:

• How you’ll scale the product step by step — local launch → regional expansion → network growth. This will help you avoid chaos and unnecessary costs.
• How the update process will work, so new features are released quickly without breaking existing functionality. Will there be a dedicated DevOps team on the project?
• How you’ll test new features and ideas on a limited number of users, reducing the risk of system-wide failure. Will you use feature flags and A/B testing?
• How product metrics will be made transparent — so decisions are based on data, not guesswork. Make sure dashboards are in place.

In the U.S., Domino’s is considered a benchmark of resilience during extreme peak demand. On Super Bowl Sunday, the company prepares in advance and gets through the surge without major outages thanks to well-thought-out architecture and monitoring systems.

The company sets up a “war room”: infrastructure, network, marketing, and support teams work in sync, tracking metrics in real time. This allows them to respond instantly to any anomalies.

Domino’s has publicly reported selling over 1.5 million pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday (≈ +36% compared to a regular Sunday). This illustrates their platform’s ability to handle sudden traffic spikes without service degradation.

Digital channels are a strategic priority for the company. In some markets, the share of digital orders exceeds 90%, which further proves the maturity of their technology stack and release processes.

On March 15, 2024, McDonald’s experienced a global technology outage caused by a configuration change at a third-party provider.In multiple countries, restaurants couldn’t process digital orders: self-service kiosks and mobile apps went down, card payments didn’t work, and some locations switched to “manual mode” or closed for hours.

The company officially confirmed the incident and its cause (a configuration change by a third party), apologized to customers, and restored service in most markets later that day.

International media reported the scale: disruptions affected Japan, Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, China, and other markets.

Protective measures should be layered:

• isolate critical systems,
• have a Plan B for POS and delivery,
• ensure offline modes are available,
• define strict MTTR standards and clear customer communication protocols.

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Max B. CEO

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In spring and summer 2024, Starbucks encountered problems with ETA accuracy for mobile orders. During peak periods, estimated pickup times didn’t match reality. This led to queues, customer frustration, and increased stress on staff.

The company admitted the accuracy gap reached up to 50% during peak hours. After updating its ETA algorithms — factoring in each store’s real-time load — Starbucks reported improved accuracy and reduced delays.

At the same time, Starbucks strengthened real-time monitoring during peak intervals and began redistributing load more flexibly between channels (mobile orders, in-store counters, pickup).

• Seasonal peaks — Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Black Friday.
• POS and CRM integrations — without them, you can’t build a stable system.
• Speed — users don’t wait; they leave.
• Backup scenarios — always have a Plan B for emergencies.

If you want to scale smoothly, start with the basics:

• Conduct a full audit of your architecture and restaurant software.
• Set up monitoring and alerting.
• Develop a scalability plan.
• Implement CI/CD and DevOps practices.
• Partner with a team that specializes in foodtech development, not just code delivery.

The restaurant and retail markets are growing fast. But customer expectations are growing even faster. Simply “being online” isn’t enough anymore. You need to be reliable, flexible, and ready to grow.

Scalability isn’t an expense. It’s insurance and an investment in the future.

That’s exactly how the dev.family team approaches business — as a living system that must not only work today but grow confidently tomorrow.