The normal activity can have peaks now and then, it's not unusual. As you can see we have reached 21 MB today (which is far from big) and we are already back to under 7 MB and 2 sat/vbyte.
Nothing to worry for now.

I thought it was something to do with Coinbase ballsing up their Segwit integration so they've headed back to normal transactions for now. I could be totally wrong but they revealed themselves to be epic spammers.

Network is operating smoothly without being cluttered right now, so whatever caused the unconfirmed transactions to increase, it's over. It happened a few times already, and the network digested it without any problems. Current block generation times are very quick, and even below the 10 minute average. I remember how last year the average block generation time surpassed 15 minutes, which was insane. That's what happens when poisonous miners can troll the network easily. Transactions from SegWit addresses cost less than $0.10 in my case, and that's very weird to see the fees be this low. I am used to just automatically include fees of 0.0005/0.001 BTC, where in some cases that wasn't even enough to get your transaction confirmed within 5 blocks.

The increasing number of unconfirmed transactions is inevitable because there's so much demand because there's so low cost that there's a lot of buildup, and if it's sustainable it's very annoying to wait.

Most people are heavily burdened with expensive transaction fees, and I also expect transaction costs to fall lower and with a fast confirmation time.