Slashdot Mirror
The Tiger Effect and Internet DDoS
An anonymous reader writes "Many US and Canadian ISPs thought they were under a massive denial of service attack yesterday — traffic spiked by hundreds of gigabits across North America. Turns out that the traffic was due to live streaming of the U.S. Open and Tiger Woods nail-biting victory."
Run for the hills! Internet traffic doubles/triples during a major sports event? Who could have known!
That's about as worthy of an article as one "discovering" Euro Cup 2008 matches causes certain European streets to be abandoned for ninety minutes.
I can understand how such a traffic increase would be reason for alarm for the average network administrator, but you'd think service providers whose main business is the infrastructure would be aware of major streaming events. This shouldn't have surprised so many people.
I used to feel the same exact way -- I thought watching golf was about as exciting as watching the grass its played on grow.
I don't know what happened, but I've gotten kind of hooked on the major tournaments. There's enough camera coverage that they actually spend most of the time with a decent golfer hitting the ball, so its not just a bunch of guys walking around, and they're almost exclusively in high definition.
And you sat on your ass and said nothing eh?
Great.