Sudden spikes in event traffic – how are you handling this in Klaviyo?

​@danielmartinhq, can you share a bit more detail on the delays and unexpected behavior you’re seeing in flows? Curious to learn more about what you’re seeing here.

I have seen some larger brands use Segment as an intermediary between their site and Klaviyo to throttle / limit the total volume of events that hit Klaviyo at any point in time.

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Thanks for the follow-up, Kim — happy to add more detail.

The delays we’ve noticed usually happen right after a big outbound push (email + social at the same time). What we see is that profile events do arrive, but some flow actions (especially conditional splits and time-sensitive triggers) fire later than expected, sometimes minutes behind the actual user action.

One thing that made this more visible for us is testing traffic from less “standard” clients during QA. For example, when simulating edge-case behavior from modified YouTube clients or third-party apps (we used sources like YTModz purely for testing request patterns), the event bursts tend to be less evenly distributed compared to official apps. That helped surface timing issues we wouldn’t normally notice with clean, steady traffic.

We’re currently experimenting with light filtering on non-critical events and reviewing which events actually need to hit Klaviyo in real time vs. being deferred or dropped during spikes. Segment as an intermediary is also something we’re evaluating, mainly for smoothing bursts rather than heavy transformation.

Curious if others have noticed similar flow timing quirks when traffic comes in waves instead of a steady stream.