A photo of a flower known as ‘New York Aster’ is mysteriously getting about 90 million hits per day and all of them are from India. Scientifically known as Symphyotrichum novi-belgii, this pretty but not so special flower has become a hit in India.
Chris Albon, director of Machine Learning at Wikimedia, tweeted about the unusual surge in traffic on Tuesday. “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 wrote.
How transparent is Wikimedia?
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. Nobody knows why.https://t.co/IHrzpKGVbj pic.twitter.com/Cbw6pC9txd
— Chris Albon (@chrisalbon) February 8, 2021
All Traffic from India
Joe at Phabricator said, “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.
We need to investigate this further as this kind of requests consitutes about 20% of all requests we get in EQSIN for media.”
One user asserted that it is most likely an app, given the header information above and also based on some other connection attributes.
The question was which app though as some of the users have gone through the popular apps in India but haven’t been able to identify which app it is. It was also possible that the code was embedded in some app and that it requests the image but does not display it.
Mystery Solved
On 9th February, Chris said that they have found the app but they didn’t mention the name of the app which was using that image. They said it is a very popular social media/chat app used in India.
Mystery solved!
TL;DR A mobile app was loading the image on startup (but not displaying it). pic.twitter.com/mGg5aHoM3v
— Chris Albon (@chrisalbon) February 9, 2021
A graph of pageviews reveals that before June 8, the flower got a few hundred views each day. Numbers jumped to 2,154 on June 9, according to The Vice. By June 30, the flower image was getting more than 15 million hits daily.
Notably, many Chinese apps including TikTok were banned on June 29, 2020 but there is still no solid proof that it is connected to TikTok.
