FanHouse

I know a reasonable amount about the internet, because I [insert lame mom's basement joke here]. But I don't wholly get the macrocosmic technical aspect of what Al Gore created; I just know it's really big and it runs all of our lives. So I'm pretty amazed when I hear that Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate nearly broke the damn thing.

Okay, they didn't break it, but there was a pretty ridiculous spike in traffic, according to the folks at Arbor Networks, who monitor such things.

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.

Obviously, this stemmed from everyone being at work. And by "work", I mean "huddled in front of computers watching Tiger and Rocco play while laughing at their bosses' request for productivity".


As you can see, the big, shiny chart below shows how the internet traffic spiked based on what was happening in the tournament. As you can see, Rocco helped, but it was Tiger's misses and makes that really drove people away from their spreadsheets and onto the video players.

Just wait until he comes back bigger and stronger too. You better watch your back, Internets.