In my current role, we currently have to think about things like holidays across the world to understand if usage patterns are low due to issues or just holidays. Being an engineer at Spotify adds another layer to the usage patterns, namely artist release patterns. I'm curious if they have a team (multiple?) that work on predicting future load based on news/artist tours/release schedules?
All of this reminds me of the TV pickup [0] phenomenon in the UK that involves kettles during commercial breaks, albeit on a longer timescale and maybe less predictable.
Interesting! Similarly, I remember an employee at water facilities telling us (~30ish years ago) that they could tell breaks in soccer games of the national team due to increased water consumption (everyone having a loo break).
Not from that page no, but the timing with the new album is pretty obvious. Apple Music also has a spike at the same time (although much smaller) https://downdetector.com/status/apple-music/
I dunno what CDN Spotify uses but I wish they'd get a better one. Timeouts which stubbornly stick in the Android client cache are annoyingly regular. Like spinning waiting for my playlist to load and I won't get to listen to that playlist until next time I open the app.
A peak of 500 reports on downdetector for a major site is probably not a noticeable let alone newsworthy outage. For example, Reddit is showing two spikes of roughly the same size in the last 24h.
All of this reminds me of the TV pickup [0] phenomenon in the UK that involves kettles during commercial breaks, albeit on a longer timescale and maybe less predictable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup