I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of golf, but even I knew that Tiger Woods was in an 18 hole play-off for the US Open with Rocco Mediate on Monday.
From about 5pm GMT, (9am local time), there was a sudden surge in Network Traffic through 70 different ISP’s in North America. Traffic peaked at about 9:30pm GMT, (1:30pm local), at a staggering 700 Gbps. That’s 500 Gbps more than usual.
Because the play-off went ahead on a Monday, most people were at work and watched the action streamed live over the Internet. The spike in traffic was so big that some engineers thought that they were witnessing a new form of DDOS, (Distributed Denial of Service), attack.
Arbor Networks have a graph of the huge traffic spike, along with a time-line of play in the US Open. They’re calling it the Tiger Effect, which would seem to be the opposite of the Slashdot Effect.