On April 16, the titan of audio streaming, Spotify, experienced an outage that left thousands of users in mysterious silence.
Users reported errors when trying to load playlists and when searching the site for music, podcasts, and other digital media.
The disruption was also observed in AppLogic Network’s Operations Insights product, which provides visibility into the world of data networks. Operations Insights captured Spotify’s traffic plunging while upstream packet loss and external latency surged – valuable metrics signaling that the issue was due to Spotify and not an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) fault. (See figure 1 below, captured from one major North American telco.)
Figure 1: This Operations Insights screen capture from one major North American telco shows Spotify volumes plunging while upstream packet loss and external latency surge. Note: The volume scale normally visible in the top graph was removed for privacy reasons.
Despite the hiccup, the outage underscored Spotify’s prominent position in the audio streaming industry and their impressive subscriber base of over 675 million active users.
As reported in AppLogic Networks’ Global Internet Phenomena Report more than 10% of internet subscribers access Spotify daily, consuming roughly 2 Mbytes of network traffic each. Still, the unexpected outage humanized the giant, reminding us that behind every digital stream lies a network susceptible to occasional turbulence.
Figure 2: A snippet from AppLogic Networks’ Global Internet Phenomena Report (GIPR)
If you are a network operator, do you know when your customers are suffering, regardless of whether it is your fault? Wouldn’t you want to get ahead of understanding if they are experiencing an outage?
Operations Insights includes extensive capabilities that enable you to understand the who, what, when, where and why of subscriber concerns and answer key questions about what is causing their bad experience – including whether the issue is specific to them, ongoing inside your network, or the result of an external factor. With Operations Insights you can stay in control of the situation and turn these hiccups into opportunities to strengthen your customer relationships.
AppLogic Networks provides ISPs visibility into what their customers are experiencing. AppLogic Networks does this by providing best-in-class classification; capturing key network KPIs such as throughput, latency, and packet loss at an application content level; and by using our AI-driven App QoE engine to score the experience. By focusing on what matters most to the end user, network operators can improve efficiency, reduce churn, and identify new revenue generating opportunities.
To download the latest GIPR click here.
To see a demonstration of Operations Insights click here.
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