I'm not sure if you are talking about the right thing. They take the store down to update the products (so they don't leak a product and not a spike in traffic)

I'm not sure if you are talking about the right thing. They take the store down to update the products (so they don't leak a product and not a spike in traffic) In terms of scale, maybe it's just not on their list of immediate concerns. If you people are buying your product such that you sell-out and get flak for running out so quickly, you would focus not on making your point-of-sale more efficient. In fact, it might even not be worth the extra millions that it'd cost for scaling on the one day of an announcements. How would you? Use the power of a distributed CDN and cache everything.