This week we had a couple of interesting things happen on the internet. Well, actually one interesting thing happened and the other interesting thing I just uncovered.

Ashburn, VA AWS Bots

I recently had a question from a client as to why they were getting so many clicks from Virginia. I had noticed this phenomenon before, but never to this extent. So, I investigated further and found that all the traffic was coming from a single city, Ashburn. So what party is happening in Ashburn, Virginia? Why are so many people from there clicking on your links?

The reason some of your click traffic appears to be coming from Ashburn is that it’s home to one of the biggest technology centers in the world, primarily Amazon.

Northern Virginia is the largest market for data center space in the U.S., home to 4.6 million square feet (SF) of commissioned data center space, representing 616 megawatts (MW) of commissioned power, according to market research from datacenterHawk. Northern Virginia is one of the primary battlegrounds in the cloud war. It’s of major strategic importance to Amazon Web Services (AWS), whose Amazon US East region spans more than 25 data centers across Loudoun and Prince William counties.

In an effort to stop my client’s statistics from looking so skewed I will be blocking “bots” from the statistics. I hope this will help, but only time will tell.

Facebook is Down

It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it sure puts a crimp on things. I had to post-pone a good portion of my work today, as I’m sure others did.

The reason for the outage was not immediately clear. However, multiple security experts quickly pointed to a Domain Name System (DNS) problem as a possible culprit. Around 1 pm ET, Cisco’s internet analysis division ThousandEyes said on Twitter that its tests indicate the outage is due to an ongoing DNS failure. The DNS translates website names into IP addresses that can be read by a computer. It’s often called the “phonebook of the internet.”

Photo by Thought Catalog from Pexels