Last night, on China’s Singles Day (11/11) Alibaba of China reported that it had seen $5 billion worth of transcations on its entire array of online platforms in first 90 minutes. In comparison, in 2014, online spending in the US onThanksgiving Day was about a billion dollars. On Black Friday was a shade over $1.5 billion. Cyber Monday 2014 was the best online shopping day ever with reported $2.04 billion in sales. Or roughly $4.6 billion.

Singles Day sales are projected to zoom past $13 billion by day’s end, WSJ reports. The sales are likely to benefit some US companies who are selling directly during the shop-fest via Alibaba’s ecosystem. Bloomberg’s Emily Chang reported that Apple, Macy’s and other brands were selling products on Singles Day, an an event created by Alibaba in 2009 and it is when many products are offered at steep discount. The target is single people, obviously!

What I want to know, how is their infrastructure architected to withstand such onslaught of sustained shopping activity.

Updated November 12, 2015: Alibaba estimated total sales for 11/11 at $14.3 billion, up 60 percent from a year ago, once again showing the growing influence of China and its consumers in matters “online” and “connected.”

Updated November 14, 2005:

Intel says: 

More than 530 Alibaba CDN clusters now run on Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel® SSDs, and high speed Ethernet adapters globally, which dramatically speed up access times.

AliCloud, Alibaba’s cloud-computing subsidiary, processed a total of 140,000 transactions per second at peak and it runs on run on Intel Xeon processors.