Who Says Golf Doesn't Move The Needle?

Thanks to reader Jeff for this post by Craig Labovitz at Arbor Networks Security Blog looking at the incredible spike in Monday Internet traffic caused by the U.S. Open playoff.

Internet Providers usually spend their time worrying about threats from hackers, link failures, and router configuration errors. Yesterday, though, many of them were worried about Tigers…

Starting around 9 am Pacific and peaking at 1:30 pm yesterday, many ISPs noticed an unusual increase in traffic. At first, a few security engineers worried they were under some type of new DDoS attack. But the flood of traffic did not appear directed at any individual customer — the gigabits of anomaly traffic surged to almost all customers from multi-national banks to the bakery down the street and home DSL / Cable users. For several ISPs, traffic into their network grew by 15-25%. In one provider, inbound traffic nearly doubled.

It turns out that the U.S. Open played at Torrey Pines yesterday generated one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds this year. Traffic dipped and peaked corresponding to Tiger’s initial misses and subsequent spectacular comeback as millions of office bound fans tuned in to the live NBC and ESPN coverage.