This year, consumers plan to spend nearly $80 billion online and in-store during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an increase of about $20 billion compared to last year.

Online outages this week have some cyber security experts reminding retailers to be more vigilant as hackers and ransomware attacks are on the rise.

Amazon-AWS outage and Cyber attack fears sent shockwaves around the world on Monday morning (US local time) ahead of the regular market hours of US Stock Market.

Major disruptions to the network backing popular apps and websites Snapchat, Reddit, Fortnite, Duolingo and Xero have largely been fixed after a day of large-scale disruption.

A major disruption to Amazon’s cloud computing platform Monday exposed the fragile nature of digital dependency. When technical problems knocked the service offline, the ripple effects touched millions: Video gamers found themselves locked out of Fortnite,