[gfv]

Pirate video releases generate heaps of traffic, and they won't be on the news. Earthquakes (mild ones, not the "cities collapse" kind) cause people to immediately go online and check on their friends. So do missile strikes, but those tend to generate extremely popular videos as well. During the holy month of Ramadan, you can see a rapid and deep traffic drop in Muslim countries right at their local sunset, when people have iftar, breaking their daily fast. A country in North Africa shuts down their internet access completely during their school exams. Popular web infrastructure sometimes reroutes your requests to distant data centers, leading to request latency exploding together with your queue lengths. In summer, the morning user activity peaks later than in autumn because schools are on their summer breaks.

I bet every seasoned SRE has a few to add.

[prox]

So cool to see these things happen!

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Here's a fun one I remember seeing a little video on: the UK power authority has to anticipate commercial breaks in major broadcasts like the World Cup because everyone turning on their electric kettle spikes the grid.

[fragmede]

black Friday/cyber Monday is the one coming up!