By now, we’ve all seen the Coldplay kiss cam fiasco.
What happened in the hours and days afterward is a case study in how fast someone’s 15 seconds of fame (or infamy) can truly ricochet around the world.
A tech CEO and his HR head were caught embracing on the jumbotron at Gillette Stadium. They looked horrified and quickly untangled, with the woman turning away and the man dodging the camera. Front man Chris Martin suggested they could be having an affair.
The fleeting moment — a fraction of a nightly segment during which Martin addresses various members of the audience — stuck with some concertgoers. In the early morning hours following the show, at least a few took to the internet to post about it.
A Reddit user who said they attended the show asked if anyone else was wondering about the couple. One TikTok user said Martin had caught “a couple having an affair” at the show, and another said that they were “constantly refreshing the TikTok search in hopes that someone recorded the couple caught red-handed at the Coldplay concert tonight.”
They were in luck. Grace Springer, who had fewer than 15,000 TikTok followers at the time, had been recording in the hopes of landing on the jumbotron herself and capturing the moment.
Shortly before 1 a.m. ET on Thursday, she posted a 15-second clip on TikTok captioned “trouble in paradise??”
“In the moment when I filmed it, I didn’t think much of it,” Springer, who didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said during an interview on the British daytime program “This Morning.” “But it wasn’t until after the concert, where I was debriefing the moment with my friends, and I said, ‘Let’s review the footage, let’s see if it really looks that bad.’ And I think it does.”
Then the algorithm did its thing, pushing the video onto For You pages the world over.
The TikTok spread like wildfire.
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It didn’t take long for internet sleuths to identify the pair as Andy Byron, the then-CEO of tech upstart Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, Astronomer’s head of HR. Their names came up in the comments of Springer’s TikTok video, though it was unclear who was the first to recognize them because the platform doesn’t display the timestamp of comments.
By 3 a.m., two hours after Springer posted the video, people were starting to look them up by name, according to data from Google Trends, which monitors search volume.
The story had changed from an awkward interaction to a corporate scandal.
Soon, people all over the world — from Ireland to Singapore — would know their names.
“It’s really sort of as we’re waking up into the day on the 17th, where we see it start to spread,” Molly Dwyer, the head of insights for social media monitoring company Peak Metrics, told Business Insider.
The amateur internet sleuths then deployed their talents to find the pair’s social profiles and those of Byron’s wife. Commenters began bombarding Byron and Cabot’s profiles, as well as those of Astronomer, which had turned off the ability to comment on posts across channels by Thursday afternoon
Meme accounts had a heyday.
“That’s sort of the bread and butter of clickbait content — laughing at people’s poor decisions — and the fact that then it plays into an anti-corporate element just further fanned the flames,” Dwyer said. He noted that there has been an uptick in interest in content that is opposed to CEOs. “It was sort of a perfect storm of things that are really viral on social media right now, all coming together.”
Storyful, a social-media research company, used ticket stubs and raw footage from Springer to corroborate she was at the concert, according to John Hall, an editor for the site. One by one, mainstream news organizations around the world started covering the story.
The online chatter kicked into high gear later on Thursday. Peak Metrics tracked 30,000 X posts in the 11 a.m. hour. Byron’s name had been Googled more than 2 million times by that afternoon, and more than $65,000 was traded on Polymarket about his chances of remaining as CEO and predictions about his marital status.
Brands like Netflix and Nando’s jumped in, posting reactions to the clip or commenting on Springer’s videos on social media. Think pieces about the surveillance state, sachenfreude, corporate America, and Coldplay proliferated.
The saga shows how quickly a single moment can take on a life of its own in the social media age — a lesson others have learned before.
While it seemed everyone had something to say, the pair at the center of it all stayed silent. (A fake apology from Byron that quoted the Coldplay song “Fix You” spread on Thursday afternoon before the company said it wasn’t real.)
Astronomer, a then little-known data startup, broke the silence on Friday with a statement that said the board was investigating the matter. Later that day, Byron was placed on leave. By Saturday, he’d resigned, and one of the company’s cofounders, Pete DeJoy, had taken his place.
The company found a silver lining in the scandal.
“The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies—let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world—ever encounter,” DeJoy wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name.”
As with any viral moment, the attention was fleeting — and one that must’ve caught Coldplay off guard, too.
“We’d like to say hello to some of you in the crowd,” Martin said on Saturday, when the band took the stage for the first time since Wednesday’s concert.
Then a warning: “We’re going to use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen. If you haven’t done your makeup, do your makeup now.”
