Inadvertent mass synchronization is a known pattern and it has a solution: jitter everything, even things triggered by events which you don't think about as syn

Inadvertent mass synchronization is a known pattern and it has a solution: jitter everything, even things triggered by events which you don't think about as synchronized. Your widget needs to fetch data periodically and the network connectivity died. You'd be tempted to start fetching data right away after it goes back, right? Okay, but if a huge network provider gets back from an outage, you will have a problem - all widgets in that region will start fetching data at the same moment.