Ordinary flower photo gets 90M hits daily from India
A graph of pageviews shows that the flower got a few hundred views each day before 8 June and the view number jumped to 2154 on 9 June. Interestingly, the number reached to 15 million by 30 June
An ordinary flower photo is getting 90 million hits per day and mysteriously all those hits are from one country- India.
The flower's photo is a Wikimedia image of a New York aster which has become very popular in India, reports NDTV.
It has been suspected that the reason may have something to do with TikTok ban in the country.
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The mysterious flower, which is now in question, is uploaded in Wikimedia commons. Wiki commons is an online platform of free-use pictures, sounds and which can be freely used and reproduced. The questionable photo's flower is purple in colour and it is commonly found in northeast America.
A post on Phabricator, an adjuvant platform open to all Wikimedia contributors, finds out that the image is getting about 90 million hits per day from various ISPs in India.
Chris Albon, director of Machine Learning at Wikimedia, tweeted about this mysterious incident on Tuesday. He wrote, "Check out this actual, live ticket about an ongoing mystery. 20% of all requests to one of our data centers for media are for this image of a flower."
He added, "Nobody knows why."
The Phabricator said it "very strange" in their post writing, "These are very strange, as they come from wildly different IPs, follow a daily traffic pattern, so we are hypothesising there is some mobile app predominantly used in India that hotlinks the above image for e.g. a splash screen."
A graph of pageviews shows that the flower got a few hundred views each day before 8 June and the view number jumped to 2154 on 9 June. Interestingly, the this number reached to 15 million by 30 June.
It should be noted that the surge in traffic occurred just after the TikTok ban in India. Indian government banned TikTok and several other Chinese apps on 29 June, 2020.
People who investigating about the surge hypothesized that the image was being used by one of the various apps that cropped up after the TikTok ban in India.
Mr Albon later confirmed that the traffic was coming from a popular mobile app.
"We noticed that the image/app gained popularity somewhere around the time India blocked Chinese internet services and websites," says a statement he shared.
The name of the app has not been revealed.
