Service Outage Question

[Latoque]

So earlier today we had a brief service outage in my area.  It lasted maybe 20-25 minutes.  I called the 1-800 number for Comcast and got the pre-recorded stuff and it mentioned the outage.  They sent me a text message to let me know when everything came back online.  But something odd happened ------I listen to a radio station all the time that streams classical music online, and it was playing when the service went down.  However, even though I could not connect to anything else online, the radio station never missed a beat, and continued playing for the entire outage.  I have it playing in a pinned tab in Firefox.  The lights on my modem and router indicated I had no connection.  The WiFi icon in my Mac's toolbar indicated I was getting no signal from the router.  All the websites I had on other tabs in Firefox lost the connection and couldn't reconnect.

So my question is-------------

How is that possible?  Why didn't I lose the radio station along with the others for the 20 or 25 minutes I supposedly had no internet service?

[NoNoBadPuppy]

Two things come to mind;

Almost all streaming music/radio stations establish a buffer and keep that buffer full so that it can continue uninterrupted playback with fluctuations in the download.  Since your shortage was so short, enough had buffered so that you didn's experience an interruption;

https://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/04/a-quick-fix-for-internet-radio-stream-skippings/

One other possibility was that your connection was fluctuating enough to 'appear' down, but was able to continue to pull enough signal during the brief intermittent periods of connection that you again did not see any interruption in music.

Streaming music does not require much bandwidth.  Had you been watching a 4k video stream, it would have been a different story. 

[Latoque]

OK thanks.  I knew there was some buffering because I put the Mac to sleep at night, and the next day when I wake it up I will get maybe 1-2 minutes of the buffered music before it stops and I have to hit the play button again.  It was just bizarre hearing it though for 25 minutes when everything else was out.