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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

I am not getting this Taylor Swift context from downdetector.com?

ah I see there was some context added at about the same time I commented. But is there really a causal link between these things?

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.

Man, I first read clowndetector. A much more promising headline.